- Dedication
- A Note Regarding Supplemental Files
- Praise for Head First PMP
- Praise for Head First PMP
- Praise for other Head First books
- How to Use this Book: Intro
- Who is this book for?
- Who should probably back away from this book?
- We know what you’re thinking.
- And we know what your brain is thinking.
- We think of a “Head First” reader as a learner.
- Metacognition: thinking about thinking
- Here’s what WE did:
- Here’s what YOU can do to bend your brain into submission
- Read me
- The technical review team
- Acknowledgments
- O’Reilly Safari
- 1. Introduction: Why get certified?
- Do these problems seem familiar?
- Projects don’t have to be this way
- Your problems...already solved
- What you need to be a good project manager
- Understand your company’s big picture
- Your project has value
- Portfolios, programs, and projects have a lot in common
- Portfolios, programs, and projects all use charters
- What a project IS...
- ... and what a project is NOT
- A day in the life of a project manager
- How project managers run great projects
- Project management offices help you do a good job, every time
- Good leadership helps the team work together
- Project teams are made of people
- Operations management handles the processes that make your company tick
- A PMP certification is more than just passing a test
- Meet a real-life PMP-certified project manager
- 2. Organizations, constraints, and projects: In good company
- A day in Kate’s life
- Kate wants a new job
- There are different types of organizations
- Kate takes a new job
- Stakeholders are impacted by your project
- More types of stakeholders
- Your project team has lots of roles too
- Back to Kate’s maintenance nightmare
- Managing project constraints
- You can’t manage your project in a vacuum
- Kate’s project needs to follow company processes
- Kate makes some changes...
- ... and her project is a success!
- 3. The Process Framework: It all fits together
- Cooking up a project
- Projects are like recipes
- If your project’s really big, you can manage it in phases
- Phases can also overlap
- Break it down
- Anatomy of a process
- Combine processes to complete your project
- Knowledge areas organize the processes
- The benefits of successful project management
- Exam Answers
- 4. Project Integration Management: Getting the job done
- Time to book a trip
- The teachers are thrilled...for now
- These clients are definitely not satisfied
- The day-to-day work of a project manager
- The six Integration Management processes
- Start your project with the Initiating processes
- Integration Management and the process groups
- The Develop Project Charter process
- Make the case for your project
- Use expert judgment and facilitation techniques to write your project charter
- A closer look at the project charter
- Two things you’ll see over and over and over...
- Plan your project!
- The Project Management plan lets you plan ahead for problems
- A quick look at all those subsidiary plans
- Question Clinic: The “just-the-facts-ma’am” question
- The Direct and Manage Project Work process
- The project team creates deliverables
- Executing the project includes repairing defects
- Eventually, things WILL go wrong...
- Sometimes you need to change your plans
- Look for changes and deal with them
- Make only the changes that are right for your project
- Changes, defects, and corrections
- Decide your changes in change control meetings
- How the processes interact with one another
- Control your changes; use change control
- Preventing or correcting problems
- Finish the work, close the project
- You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here
- So why INTEGRATION Management?
- Integration Management kept your project on track, and the teachers satisfied
- 5. Scope Management: Doing the right stuff
- Out of the frying pan...
- ... and right back into the fire
- Cubicle conversation
- It looks like we have a scope problem
- You’ve got to know what (and how) you will build before you build it
- The power of Scope Management
- The six Scope Management processes
- Plan your scoping processes
- Now you’ve got a roadmap for managing scope
- Cubicle conversation
- Collect requirements for your project
- Talk to your stakeholders
- Make decisions about requirements
- Help your team to get creative
- Use a questionnaire to get requirements from a bigger group of people
- Observation can help you see things from a different point of view
- A prototype shows users what your product will be like
- Now you’re ready to write a requirements document
- Define the scope of the project
- How do you define the scope?
- The project scope statement tells you what you have to do
- Question Clinic: The “which-is-BEST” question
- Create the work breakdown structure
- The inputs for the WBS come from other processes
- Breaking down the work
- Break it down by project or phase
- Decompose deliverables into work packages
- Inside the work package
- The project scope baseline is a snapshot of the plan
- The outputs of the Create WBS process
- Cubicle conversation
- Why scope changes
- The Control Scope process
- Anatomy of a change
- A closer look at the change control system
- Just one Control Scope tool/technique
- Make sure the team delivered the right product
- The stakeholders decide when the project is done
- Is the project ready to go?
- The project is ready to ship!
- 6. Time management: Getting it done on time
- Reality sets in for the happy couple
- Meet the wedding planner
- Time management helps with aggressive timelines
- Plan your scheduling processes
- Now you know how you’ll track your schedule
- Use the Define Activities process to break down the work
- Tools and techniques for Define Activities
- Rolling wave planning lets you plan as you go
- Define activities outputs
- The Sequence Activities process puts everything in order
- Diagram the relationship between activities
- Network diagrams put your tasks in perspective
- Dependencies help you sequence your activities
- Leads and lags add time between activities
- Create the network diagram
- Rob and Rebecca have resource problems
- What you need to estimate resources
- Estimating the resources
- Figuring out how long the project will take
- Estimation tools and techniques
- Create the duration estimate
- Back to the wedding
- Bringing it all together
- Question Clinic: The “which-comes-next” question
- One thing leads to another
- Use the critical path method to avoid big problems
- How to find the critical path
- Finding the float for any activity
- Float tells you how much extra time you have
- Figure out the early start and early finish
- Figure out the latest possible start and finish
- Add early and late durations to your diagrams
- Take a backward pass to find late start and finish
- Let’s take some time out to walk through this!
- Crash the schedule
- Fast-tracking the project
- Modeling techniques
- Other Develop Schedule tools and techniques
- Outputs of Develop Schedule
- Influence the factors that cause change
- Control Schedule inputs and outputs
- What Control Schedule updates
- Measuring and reporting performance
- Control Schedule tools and techniques
- Another satisfied customer!
- 7. Cost Management: Watching the bottom line
- Time to expand the Head First Lounge
- The guys go overboard
- Lounge conversation
- Introducing the Cost Management processes
- Plan how you’ll estimate, track, and control your costs
- Now you’ve got a consistent way to manage costs
- What Alice needs before she can estimate costs
- Other tools and techniques used in Estimate Costs
- Let’s talk numbers
- Now Alice knows how much the Lounge will cost
- Lounge conversation
- The Determine Budget process
- What you need to build your budget
- Determine budget: how to build a budget
- Question Clinic: The red herring
- The Control Costs process is a lot like schedule control
- A few new tools and techniques
- Look at the schedule to figure out your budget
- How to calculate planned value
- Earned value tells you how you’re doing
- How to calculate earned value
- Put yourself in someone else’s shoes
- Is your project behind or ahead of schedule?
- Are you over budget?
- The earned value management formulas
- Interpret CPI and SPI numbers to gauge your project
- Forecast what your project will look like when it’s done
- Meanwhile, back in the Lounge
- Once you’ve got an estimate, you can calculate a variance!
- Finding missing information
- Keep your project on track with TCPI
- A high TCPI means a tight budget
- Party time!
- 8. Quality Management: Getting it right
- What is quality?
- You need more than just tests to figure out quality
- Once you know what the product is supposed to do, it’s easy to tell which tests pass and which fail
- Quality up close
- Quality vs. grade
- “An ounce of prevention...”
- Plan Quality is how you prevent defects
- How to plan for quality
- The Quality Management plan gives you what you need to manage quality
- Inspect your deliverables
- Use the planning outputs for Control Quality
- The seven basic tools of quality
- Pareto charts, flowcharts, and histograms
- Checksheets and scatter diagrams
- More quality control tools
- Question Clinic: The “which-one” question
- Quality control means finding and correcting defects
- Trouble at the Black Box 3000TM factory
- Introducing Quality Assurance
- A closer look at some tools and techniques
- More ideas behind quality assurance
- The Black Box 3000TM makes record profits!
- Exam Answers
- 9. Human Resource Management: Getting the team together
- Mike needs a new team
- Cubicle conversation
- Get your team together and keep them moving
- Figure out who you need on your team
- The Staffing Management plan
- Get the team together
- Cubicle conversation
- Develop your project team
- Develop the team with your management skills
- Your interpersonal skills can make a big difference for your team
- Lead the team with your management skills
- Motivate your team
- Stages of team development
- How’s the team doing?
- Cubicle conversation
- Managing your team means solving problems
- Conflict management up close
- How to resolve a conflict
- The Cows Gone Wild IV team ROCKS!
- Question Clinic: The “have-a-meeting” question
- 10. Communications management: Getting the word out
- Party at the Head First Lounge!
- But something’s not right
- Anatomy of communication
- Get a handle on communication
- Tell everyone what’s going on
- Get the message?
- More Manage Communications tools
- Let everyone know how the project’s going
- Take a close look at the work being done
- Now you can get the word out
- People aren’t talking!
- Count the channels of communication
- It’s party time!
- Question Clinic: The calculation question
- 11. Project Risk Management: Planning for the unknown
- What’s a risk?
- How you deal with risk
- Plan Risk Management
- Use a risk breakdown structure to categorize risks
- Anatomy of a risk
- What could happen to your project?
- Information-gathering techniques for Identify Risks
- More Identify Risks techniques
- Where to look for risks
- Now put it in the risk register
- Rank your risks
- Examine each risk in the register
- Qualitative vs. quantitative analysis
- Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis
- First gather the data...
- ... then analyze it
- Calculate the expected monetary value of your risks
- Decision tree analysis uses EMV to help you make choices
- Update the risk register based on your quantitative analysis results
- How do you respond to a risk?
- It isn’t always so bad
- Response planning can even find more risks
- Add risk responses to the register
- You can’t plan for every risk at the start of the project
- Control Risks is another change control process
- How to control your risks
- More control risk tools and techniques
- Question Clinic: The “which-is-NOT” question
- 12. Procurement Management: Getting some help
- Victim of her own success
- Calling in the cavalry
- Ask the legal expert
- Anatomy of an agreement
- Start with a plan for the whole project
- The decision is made
- Types of contractual agreements
- More about contracts
- Figure out how you’ll sort out potential sellers
- Get in touch with potential sellers
- Pick a partner
- Two months later...
- Keep an eye on the contract
- Stay on top of the seller
- Close the contract when the work is done
- Kate closes the contract
- Question Clinic: BYO questions
- Exam Questions
- Exam Answers
- 13. Stakeholder Management: Keeping everyone engaged
- Party at the Head First Lounge (again)!
- Not everybody is thrilled
- Understanding your stakeholders
- Find out who your stakeholders are
- Stakeholder analysis up close
- How engaged are your stakeholders?
- Managing stakeholder engagement means clearing up misunderstandings
- Control your stakeholders’ engagement
- Now you can tell when you need to change the way you deal with stakeholders
- It’s party time!
- Exam Questions
- Exam Answers
- 14. Professional Responsibility: Making good choices
- 15. A Little Last-Minute Review: Check your knowledge
- 16. Practice makes perfect Practice PMP exam
- Index
- About the Authors
- Copyright
Praise for Head First PMP
“I have been doing project management for over 30 years and am considered a subject matter expert in the PMBOK Guide, Third Edition, primarily because I am the project manager who led the team that developed this edition...I can honestly say that Head First PMP is by far the best PMP exam preparation book of all I have reviewed in depth. It is the very best basic education and training book that I have read that presents the processes for managing a project, which makes it a great resource for a basic project management class for beginners as well as a tool for practitioners who want to pass the PMP exam. The graphical story format is unique, as project management books go, which makes it both fun and easy to read while driving home the basics that are necessary for preparing someone who is just getting started and those who want to take the exam.”
—Dennis Bolles, PMP Project manager for the PMBOK Guide, Third Edition, Leadership Team, DLB Associates, LLC, and coauthor of The Power of Enterprise-Wide Project Management
“This looks like too much fun to be a PMP study guide! Behind the quirky humor and nutty graphics lies an excellent explanation of the project management processes. Not only will this book make it easier to pass the exam, you’ll learn a lot of good stuff to use on the job too.”
—Carol Steuer, PMP PMBOK Guide, Third Edition, Leadership Team
“This is the best thing to happen to PMP since, well, ever. You’ll laugh, learn, pass the exam, and become a better project manager all at the same time.”
—Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management and The Myths of Innovation
“I love the brain-friendly approach used by Head First. When was the last time you heard that a PMP prep book was fun to read? This one really is!”
—Andy Kaufman, host of the People and Projects Podcast on iTunes
“Head First PMP is the PMP exam prep book for the rest of us: the people who live project management daily and want an exam prep book that is as interesting as the work we live, prepares them for the exam, and helps them become a better project manager. I’ve taken my copy of the first edition to numerous exam prep classes I have helped teach as a reference book. Students will pick it up, review several pages or topics and say, ‘That is how I learn. Can I take your copy?’ The impact and satisfaction is immediate.”
—Ken Jones, PMP and project manager
“In today’s business world, it’s not just what you get done, it’s how you get it done. To that end, Head First PMP has just the right balance of wit and fun that makes learning the Project Management Body of Knowledge engaging and interesting.”
—Jen Poisson, Director of Production Operations, Disney Online
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