Exam Cram: 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.

Project Management Process Groups

Not all project management processes apply to all projects or project phases. Process groups can overlap and interact. Forty-two project management processes are contained within the five project management process groups:

1. Initiating

2. Planning

3. Executing

4. Monitoring and controlling

5. Closing

Initiating Process Group

Formally authorizes new project or project phase. The two processes are

1. Develop project charter—Authorizing project or project phase. The project charter defines the project’s purpose, identifies objectives, and authorizes the project manager to start the project.

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 scope.

4. Create WBS—Subdividing major project deliverables and project work into smaller, more manageable components.

5. Define activities—Identifying specific activities to be performed to produce project deliverables.

6. Sequence activities—Identifying and documenting dependencies among schedule activities.

7. Estimate activity resources—Type and quantity of resources required to perform each schedule activity.

8. Estimate activity durations—Number of work periods needed to complete individual schedule activities.

9. Develop schedule—Analyzing activity sequences, durations, resource requirements, and schedule constraints to create project schedule.

10. Estimate costs—Developing approximation 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.

Executing Process Group

Integrates resources to carry out project management plan. These eight processes are

1. Direct and manage project execution—Directing technical and organization interfaces to execute work defined in project management plan.

2. Perform quality assurance—Applying planned, systematic quality activities to ensure project employs processes needed to meet requirements.

3. Acquire project team—Obtaining human resources needed to complete project.

4. Develop project team—Development improves competencies and interaction of team members.

5. Manage project team—Tracking team member performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and coordinating changes to enhance project performance.

6. Distribute information—Providing information to stakeholders in a timely manner.

7. Manage stakeholder expectations—Managing stakeholder expectations to satisfy their requirements and resolve issues.

8. Conduct procurements—Obtaining seller responses, selecting sellers, and awarding contracts.

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.

7. Perform quality control—Monitoring project results to determine compliance with quality standards and identifying ways to eliminate unsatisfactory performance.

8. Report performance—Collecting and distributing performance information, including status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting.

9. Monitor and control risks—Tracking identified risks, monitoring risks, identifying new risks, executing risk response plans, and evaluating their effectiveness throughout the project life cycle.

10. Administer procurements—Managing contract between buyer and seller, reviewing and documenting seller performance, and managing contractual relationship with outside buyer of project.

Closing Process Group

Formalizes acceptance of product, service, or result and brings project or project phase to an end. The following two processes are included:

1. Close project or phase—Finalizing all activities across process groups to formally close project or project phase.

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

Project Management Knowledge Areas

Not all project management knowledge areas apply to all projects or project phases. Knowledge areas can interact and overlap. All 42 project management processes are contained within the nine project management knowledge areas:

1. Integration Management

2. Scope Management

3. Time Management

4. Cost Management

5. Quality Management

6. Human resource Management

7. Communications Management

8. Risk Management

9. Procurement 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.

• 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.

• Change control system—Subsystem of configuration management system; documented procedures defining how project deliverables and documentation are controlled, changed, and approved.

• Closure procedures—The two types are administrative (documents all activities for executing administrative closure for project, including lessons learned) and procurement (documents all activities for executing closure of any project contracts).

• Earned value technique (EVT)—Measures project performance moving through project life cycle; a forecasting tool that uses past performance to predict future performance.

Project Scope Management

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

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

1. Define activities

2. Sequence activities

3. Estimate activity resources

4. Estimate activity durations

5. Develop schedule

6. Control schedule

Two planning components when incomplete definition exists in WBS:

• Control account—Basis for planning when associated work packages have not been developed.

• Planning package—Planning known work content without detailed schedule activities.

• Precedence diagramming method (PDM)—Connecting nodes with arrows to show dependencies; also called activity-on-node (AON). Four dependencies:

• Finish-to-Start—Most common

• Finish-to-Finish

• Start-to-Start

• Start-to-Finish—Rare

• Dependency determination—Three types to define sequence among activities:

• Mandatory

• Discretionary

• External

Types of estimating:

• Bottom-up—When a schedule activity cannot be estimated to a reasonable degree, work within the schedule activity is decomposed and an estimate developed from more detailed level.

• Analogous—Using actual duration of similar schedule activity as basis for future schedule activity estimate.

• Parametric—Multiplying quantity of work to be performed by productivity rate.

• Three-point—Using average of three estimates based on what is most likely, optimistic, and pessimistic.

Schedule network analysis techniques:

• Critical path method—Calculates early start and finish dates, and late start and finish dates, for all activities, without considering resource limitations, by performing forward pass and backward pass analysis through project schedule network paths.

• Resource leveling—Addresses schedule activities that need to be performed to meet specified dates to address situation where critical required resources are only available at certain times or are limited in quantity or to keep resource usage at constant levels.

• Critical chain method—Modifies project schedule to account for limited resources.

• Schedule compression—Shortens project schedule without changing project scope; used on critical path.

• Fast tracking—Sequential phases or activities are performed in parallel.

Project Cost Management

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

• Estimate costs

• Determine budget

• Control costs

1. Cost estimating methods:

• Analogous

• Bottom-up

• Parametric

• Determine resource cost rates

• Vendor bid analysis

• Project management software

2. Earned value technique terms:

• Planned value (PV) = Budgeted cost for work scheduled

• Earned value (EV) = Budgeted cost for work performed

• Actual value (AV) = Actual cost for work completed

• Cost variance (CV) = EV minus AC

• Schedule variance (SV) = EV minus PV

• Cost performance index (CPI) = EV divided by AC

• Schedule performance index (SPI) = EV divided by PV

3. Performance reporting techniques:

• Variance analysis

• Trend analysis

• Earned value technique (EVT)

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

Project Communication Management

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

4. Manage stakeholder expectations

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

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)

• Strategies for positive risks or opportunities:

• Risk exploitation

• Risk sharing

• Risk enhancement

• Strategies for negative risks or threats:

• Risk avoidance

• Risk transfer

• Risk mitigation

Project Procurement Management

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.