PMP Study Sheet

PMP Cram Sheet This Cram Sheet contains distilled, key facts about the PMP Exam.

Project Management Framework 1. Project—Temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. 2. Progressive elaboration—Developing in steps and continuing by increments; it’s a characteristic of projects. 3. Project life cycle—Phases that connect the beginning of a project to its end; project life cycle phases are not the same as project management processes. 4. Level of uncertainty—This is highest, and risk of failure is greatest, at the start of a project. 5. Ability of stakeholders to influence project—This is highest at the start and gets progressively lower as the project continues. 6. Cost of changes and correcting errors— These increase as the project continues.

2. Identify stakeholders—Documents all of the people or organizations that have an interest in the outcome of the project and their level of interest, impact, and involvement.

Planning Process Group Defines objectives and plans course of action required to meet objectives and project scope. Facilitates project planning across process groups. The 20 processes are

1. Develop project management plan— Primary source for how project is planned, executed, monitored, controlled, and closed. It’s an iterative and ongoing process often resulting in changes to the project management plan. This progressive detailing is called rolling wave planning. 2. Collect requirements—Documenting the stakeholders’ needs to meet the project objectives. 3. Define scope—Developing a detailed Project Management Process project scope. Groups 4. Create WBS—Subdividing major project Not all project management processes apply to deliverables and project work into smaller, all projects or project phases. Process groups more manageable components. can overlap and interact. Forty-two project 5. Define activities—Identifying specific management processes are contained within activities to be performed to produce the five project management process groups: project deliverables. 1. Initiating 6. Sequence activities—Identifying and 2. Planning documenting dependencies among schedule activities. 3. Executing 7. Estimate activity resources—Type and 4. Monitoring and controlling quantity of resources required to perform 5. Closing each schedule activity. 8. Estimate activity durations—Number Initiating Process Group of work periods needed to complete Formally authorizes new project or project individual schedule activities. phase. The two processes are 9. Develop schedule—Analyzing activity sequences, durations, resource require 1. Develop project charter—Authorizing ments, and schedule constraints to create project or project phase. The project project schedule. charter defines the project’s purpose, identifies objectives, and authorizes the 10. Estimate costs—Developing approxiproject manager to start the project. mation of costs of resources needed to complete project activities.

11. Determine budget—Aggregating estimated costs of individual activities to establish cost baseline. 12. Plan quality—Identifying relevant quality standards and determining how to satisfy them. 13. Develop human resource plan— Identifying and documenting project roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships. 14. Plan communications—Determining stakeholder communication needs. 15. Plan risk management—Deciding how to approach, plan, and execute risk management activities. 16. Identify risks—Determining which risks might affect the project and documenting their characteristics. 17. Perform qualitative risk analysis— Prioritizing risks for subsequent further analysis by assessing and combining their probabilities of occurrence and impacts. 18. Perform quantitative risk analysis— Numerically analyzing the effect on project objectives of identified risks. 19. Plan risk responses—Developing options to enhance opportunities and reduce threats to project objectives. 20. Plan procurements—Documenting products, services, and results requirements and identifying potential sellers.

Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Monitors progress to identify variances from the project management plan so corrective action can be taken to meet project objectives. The following ten processes are included:

1. Monitor and control project work— Collecting, measuring, and disseminating performance information and assessing measurements and trends to affect process improvements. Includes risk monitoring to ensure risks are identified early, their statuses reported, and risk plans executed. Monitoring includes status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting. 2. Perform integrated change control— Ensure changes are beneficial; determine whether a change has occurred; and manage approved changes, including when they occur. Performed throughout project life cycle. 3. Verify scope—Acceptance of completed project deliverables. 4. Control scope—Controlling changes to project scope. 5. Control schedule—Controlling changes to project schedule. 6. Control costs—Influencing factors that create variances and controlling changes to project budget. Executing Process Group 7. Perform quality control—Monitoring Integrates resources to carry out project project results to determine compliance management plan. These eight processes are with quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate unsatisfactory performance. 1. Direct and manage project execution— Directing technical and organization 8. Report performance—Collecting and interfaces to execute work defined in distributing performance information, project management plan. including status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting. 2. Perform quality assurance—Applying planned, systematic quality activities to 9. Monitor and control risks—Tracking ensure project employs processes needed identified risks, monitoring risks, identifying to meet requirements. new risks, executing risk response plans, and evaluating their effectiveness through 3. Acquire project team—Obtaining human out the project life cycle. resources needed to complete project. 10. Administer procurements—Managing 4. Develop project team—Development contract between buyer and seller, reviewimproves competencies and interaction of ing and documenting seller performance, team members. and managing contractual relationship with 5. Manage project team—Tracking team outside buyer of project. member performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and coordinating changes Closing Process Group to enhance project performance. 6. Distribute information—Providing inforFormalizes acceptance of product, service, or mation to stakeholders in a timely manner. result and brings project or project phase to an 7. Manage stakeholder expectations— end. The following two processes are included: Managing stakeholder expectations to 1. Close project or phase—Finalizing all satisfy their requirements and resolve activities across process groups to formally issues. close project or project phase. 8. Conduct procurements—Obtaining seller responses, selecting sellers, and awarding contracts.

2. Close procurements—Completing each procurement, including resolution of open items, and closing each procurement relevant to project or project phase.

. Configuration management system—Subsystem of PMIS; process for submitting proposed changes, tracking systems for reviewing and approving changes, defining approval levels for changes, and validating approved changes. Project Management . Change control system—Subsystem Knowledge Areas of configuration management system; Not all project management knowledge documented procedures defining how areas apply to all projects or project phases. project deliverables and documentation Knowledge areas can interact and overlap. are controlled, changed, and approved. All 42 project management processes are . Closure procedures—The two types contained within the nine project manageare administrative (documents all activiment knowledge areas: ties for executing administrative closure for project, including lessons learned) 1. Integration Management and procurement (documents all 2. Scope Management activities for executing closure of any 3. Time Management project contracts). 4. Cost Management . Earned value technique (EVT)— 5. Quality Management Measures project performance moving 6. Human resource Management through project life cycle; a forecasting tool that uses past performance to 7. Communications Management predict future performance. 8. Risk Management 9. Procurement Management

Project Scope Management

Project Integration Management The six processes occurring in every project management process group are

1. Develop project charter 2. Develop project management plan 3. Direct and manage project execution 4. Monitor and control project work 5. Perform integrate change control 6. Close project or phase

. Project statement of work (SOW)— A narrative description of products or services to be supplied by project. . Chartering project—Links it to ongoing work of sponsoring organization. . Project selection methods—The two categories are benefit measurement and mathematical models. . Project management methodology—A set of process groups, their processes, and control functions. . Project management information system (PMIS)—Automated tools to support information creation and dissemination.

The five processes occurring in two project management process groups (planning, and monitoring and controlling) are

1. Collect requirements 2. Define scope 3. Create WBS 4. Verify scope 5. Control scope

. Decomposition—Subdivision of project deliverables into small, more manageable components until work and deliverables are defined to work package level. . Work package—Lowest level of WBS; cost and schedule can be reliably estimated. . Organizational breakdown structure (OBS)—Hierarchical breakdown of project organization to depict work packages by performing organizational unit. . Resource breakdown structure (RBS)—Hierarchical, organized depiction of resources by type to be used.

Project Time Management

Schedule network analysis techniques:

. Critical path method—Calculates The six processes occurring in two project early start and finish dates, and late management process groups (planning, and start and finish dates, for all activities, monitoring and controlling) are without considering resource limitations, by performing forward pass and 1. Define activities backward pass analysis through project 2. Sequence activities schedule network paths. 3. Estimate activity resources . Resource leveling—Addresses sched 4. Estimate activity durations ule activities that need to be performed 5. Develop schedule to meet specified dates to address situ 6. Control schedule ation where critical required resources are only available at certain times or are Two planning components when incomplete limited in quantity or to keep resource definition exists in WBS: usage at constant levels. . Control account—Basis for planning . Critical chain method—Modifies when associated work packages have project schedule to account for limited not been developed. resources. . Planning package—Planning known . Schedule compression—Shortens work content without detailed schedule project schedule without changing activities. project scope; used on critical path. . Precedence diagramming method . Fast tracking—Sequential phases or (PDM)—Connecting nodes with activities are performed in parallel. arrows to show dependencies; also called activity-on-node (AON). Four Project Cost Management dependencies: The three processes occurring in two project . Finish-to-Start—Most common management process groups (planning, and . Finish-to-Finish monitoring and controlling) are . Start-to-Start . Estimate costs . Start-to-Finish—Rare . Determine budget . Dependency determination—Three . Control costs types to define sequence among activities: 1. Cost estimating methods: . Mandatory . Analogous . Discretionary . Bottom-up . External . Parametric . Determine resource cost rates Types of estimating: . Bottom-up—When a schedule activity . Vendor bid analysis . Project management software cannot be estimated to a reasonable degree, work within the schedule activ- 2. Earned value technique terms: ity is decomposed and an estimate . Planned value (PV) = Budgeted developed from more detailed level. cost for work scheduled . Analogous—Using actual duration of . Earned value (EV) = Budgeted cost similar schedule activity as basis for for work performed future schedule activity estimate. . Actual value (AV) = Actual cost for . Parametric—Multiplying quantity of work completed work to be performed by productivity .  Cost variance (CV) = EV minus AC rate. . Schedule variance (SV) = EV minus . Three-point—Using average of three PV estimates based on what is most likely, . Cost performance index (CPI) = EV optimistic, and pessimistic. divided by AC . Schedule performance index (SPI) = EV divided by PV 3. Performance reporting techniques: . Variance analysis . Trend analysis . Earned value technique (EVT)

Project Communication Management

Project Quality Management The three processes occurring in three project management process groups (planning, executing, and monitoring and controlling) are 1. Plan quality 2. Perform quality assurance 3. Perform quality control . Benchmarking—Comparing actual or planned project practices to other projects as a basis for performance measurement. . Metric—Operational definition describing what something is and how the quality control process measures it. . Quality audits—Structured, independent review to determine if project activities comply with organizational and project policies, procedures, and processes. . Seven basic tools of quality: . Cause and effect diagram . Control charts . Flowcharting . Histogram . Pareto chart . Run chart . Scatter diagram

Project Human Resource Management The four processes occurring in two project management process groups (planning and executing) are

1. Develop human resource plan 2. Acquire project team 3. Develop project team 4. Manage project team

. Responsibility assignment matrix (RAM)—Connections between work that needs to be done and project team members. . RACI chart format—A type of RAM where project team members are assigned one of the following tasks for each activity: responsible, accountable, consult, and inform. . Organizational structure—The three types are functional, matrix (weak, balanced, or strong), and projectized

The five processes occurring in four project management process groups (initiating, planning, executing, and monitoring and controlling) are

1. Identify stakeholders 2. Plan communications 3. Distribute information

. Strategies for negative risks or threats: . Risk avoidance . Risk transfer . Risk mitigation

4. Manage stakeholder expectations

Project Procurement Management

5. Report performance

. Basic communication model components: . Encode . Message . Medium . Noise . Decode

Project Risk Management The six processes occurring in two project management process groups (planning and monitoring and controlling) are

. Strategies for positive risks or opportunities: . Risk exploitation . Risk sharing . Risk enhancement

1. Plan risk management 2. Identify risks 3. Perform qualitative risk analysis 4. Perform quantitative risk analysis 5. Plan risk responses 6. Monitor and control risks

. Project risk involves uncertain events or conditions that, if they occur, have positive or negative effects on at least one project objective. . Information gathering techniques: . Brainstorming . Delphi technique . Interviewing . Root cause identification . Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis . Risk diagramming techniques: . Cause-and-effect diagrams . System or process flow charts . Influence diagrams . Quantitative risk analysis techniques: . Sensitivity analysis . Expected monetary value analysis . Decision tree analysis . Modeling and simulation (Monte Carlo technique)

The four processes occurring in four project management process groups (planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing) are

1. Plan procurements 2. Conduct procurements 3. Administer procurements 4. Close procurements

. Make-or-buy analysis—Whether product or service can be produced by project team or can be purchased . Contract types: . Fixed-price or lump-sum contract . Cost-reimbursable contract . Time and Materials contract

PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct . Ethical violations—Report possible violations of code to PMI and cooperate with investigations. . Conflict of interest—Occurs when personal interests are placed before professional responsibility. Avoid this; if that’s not possible, identify and communicate all potential conflicts to all parties. . Personal gain—Tied to conflict of interest, it’s when someone benefits inappropriately in exchange for influencing a project. Prohibited. . Inappropriate compensation—Tied to conflict of interest, this can include payments and gifts for personal gain. Prohibited. . Appearance of impropriety—When conflict of interest is not communicated to all parties, your work and actions might appear improper. . Intellectual property—A product developed and owned by others with commercial value. Recognize and respect copyrighted material. . Confidentiality—Maintain and respect sensitive information, including intellectual property, obtained through your work.