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Lesson 1: Introduction

This lesson will provide an overview of how the course is structured around the Exam Content Outline (ECO), familiarize you with the PMP certification requirements, and review the eight exam question formats, including guidance on interpreting scenario-based questions.
 

Lesson 2: The Big Picture

Before initiating a project, a project manager will need to be familiar with the knowledge areas essential to the practice of project management.

• PMP Exam Domains – The PMP® exam is structured around three domains: People, Process, and Business Environment; further broken down into tasks the project manager is responsible for, and enablers that demonstrate the tasks
• Project Life Cycles and Development Approaches – Understand PMI’s project definition and the project life cycles that provide the basic framework for managing projects, regardless of the development approach used.
• Introduction to Governance – Assess the governance framework that enables organizations to deliver projects through established functions and processes that guide project management activities to create a unique product, service, or result aligned with the organizational strategic and operational goals
   

Lesson 3: Stakeholders, Vision, and Communication

Project Managers need stakeholders to have a shared direction before they can meaningfully plan, negotiate, or manage expectations; therefore, you will examine stakeholders early in a project.

• Identifying and Understanding Stakeholders – Review the tasks and tools used at the start of the project to establish effective relationships and communication with stakeholders, while maintaining a focus on what the project means for them individually and/or as a group.
• Developing a Common Vision – Once you identify the project stakeholders, you will need to develop a common vision that is communicated and maintained throughout the project life cycle. This is essential to achieving successful project outcomes and integral to effective stakeholder engagement.
• Planning and Managing Communication – The network of information that holds a project together is the backbone for defining a communication strategy, promoting transparency and collaboration, establishing a feedback loop, understanding reporting requirements, and creating reports aligned with sponsors’ and stakeholders’ expectations while supporting reporting and governance processes

Lesson 4: Team, Conflict, and Knowledge

With your stakeholders and communications defined, it’s time to focus on your project team. In this lesson, you will consider the project team’s roles and responsibilities, conflict management, and the importance of knowledge transfer.

• Leading and Structuring the Team – Role clarity and your leadership style will underpin your team’s performance; therefore, establishing clear roles and responsibilities helps prevent confusion, fosters accountability, and ensures smooth collaboration throughout the project. This includes setting expectations at the team level and assessing the appropriate leadership style that fits the project team’s needs, project context, and organizational culture. The project manager synthesizes motivational theories to empower the team, supports the value of diversity and inclusion, and applies structured problem-solving techniques to foster collaboration, identify challenges that arise during a project, and address them.
• Managing Conflict – Project managers are always balancing competing constraints among people with different goals, incentives and working styles; therefore, the project manager needs to eliminate destructive conflict and channel it into better decisions and stronger commitment. This is achieved by identifying the sources of conflict and analyzing their root causes in the context in which they occur.
• - The economy runs on knowledge. That’s why information technology has been such a booming industry for the last few decades. Knowledge transfer is a valuable skill and can be harder to teach than one might think. Therefore, in this section, you will use the tools and techniques necessary to identify the knowledge critical to the project and to gather knowledge while fostering an environment for knowledge transfer.
  
   

Lesson 5: Core Planning - Scope, Value, Resources, Finance and Risk

Planning is at the core of project management, and several tasks will be executed to develop the scope and ensure the project outcome aligns with the expected value orientation. Therefore, assessing risk and compliance while planning and managing finances and resources sets the baselines for the project's expected outcome.

• Developing Scope and Value Orientation - To develop scope with a strong value orientation, you need to treat scope as a vehicle for outcomes rather than a catalogue of requested features. In PMI terms, a project’s value derives from the outcome delivered in alignment with its scope, so the goal of scope work is to ensure you do all and only the work that contributes to the intended value while preventing scope creep.
• Risk and Compliance Foundations – Risk and compliance are tightly linked through governance, which is critical to every project. Project managers are required to demonstrate their understanding of project compliance requirements, classify compliance requirements, and identify potential threats to compliance using methods and tools that support compliance throughout the project life cycle. This can be achieved by identifying approaches to measuring project compliance, tracking overall progress, monitoring project activities, reviewing the status and quality of deliverables, and analyzing risk reports.
• Planning and Managing Finance – Every project decision has financial implications; therefore, understanding how to plan, track, and manage those costs is key to delivering lasting value. In this section, you’ll explore estimation techniques, learn to build and maintain a realistic budget, and monitor financial performance throughout the project using earned value management (EVM) techniques.
• Planning and Managing Resources – In this section, you’ll focus on how to bring your project team and resources together for success. First, you will identify the people, skills, and materials needed to meet the project requirements, and then plan for their availability and use. From there, you will explore strategies to manage and optimize those resources as the project evolves by balancing workloads, anticipating constraints, and adapting to change.

Lesson 6: Integrated Planning - Method, Plan, Schedule, Quality and Procurement

Now that scope, value, risk, finance, and resources are figured out, it’s time to address integrated planning and the major subsidiary plans covered under the four tasks in this lesson.Planning is at the core of project management, and several tasks will be executed to develop the scope and ensure the project outcome alignNow that scope, value, risk, finance, and resources are figured out, it’s time to address integrated planning and the major subsidiary plans covered under the four tasks in this lesson.

• Developing an Integrated Project Management Plan and Plan Delivery – Now it’s time to bring together all the moving parts of the project into one cohesive project management plan that outlines how to integrate scope, schedule, cost, risk, and quality into a single roadmap that keeps everyone aligned and the project on track.
• Planning and Managing the Schedule – Based on the tailoring approach the project manager identifies to ensure value delivery, you will prepare the schedule by considering the different approaches to project delivery, how project tasks are estimated, the tools used to estimate the work, and the creation of the project schedule, while accounting for the needs of coordinating with other projects and operations. You will also assess the execution of the Schedule Management Plan and how to analyze schedule variation.
• Planning and Optimizing the Quality of Products and Deliverables - Planning and optimizing for quality is integral to your project’s success. It helps ensure that the products and deliverables your team delivers are effective, aligned with the project’s objectives, and contribute to customer and business satisfaction. Therefore, gathering quality requirements for project deliverables will assist with planning for quality and with the tools used to ensure reliable execution of the Quality Management Plan, while keeping regulatory compliance in mind. Quality would not be complete without understanding how much quality costs; therefore, the cost of quality (CoQ) model helps account for the costs incurred over the product life cycle related to preventing nonconformance, appraising the product or service for conformance, and addressing failures to meet the requirements, which requires ongoing quality reviews and implementing continuous improvement.
• Planning and Managing Procurement - Effective planning and management of procurement ensure that your project acquires the goods and services it needs efficiently, cost-effectively, and in compliance with legal and contractual requirements. This contributes to successful delivery by aligning procurement activities with the overall project scope, schedule, and budget. Proper procurement planning also enhances coordination, avoids duplication, and optimizes purchases by considering economies of scale and contractual strategies. Therefore, project managers need to plan for procurement by developing a procurement and negotiation strategy, selecting a preferred contract type, participating in contract negotiations, and outlining the steps to execute the Procurement Management Plan that will support managing suppliers and contracts, and evaluating vendor performance to ensure the procurement objectives are met.
   

Lesson 7: Execution, Monitoring, Change and Impediments

With the project manager’s plan in place, it’s time to focus on running the project. Execution, monitoring, change, and impediments are the “engine room” of delivery. The project manager converts plans into deliverables, continuously checks whether the project remains on track to deliver the intended value, and adapts when reality changes. The three tasks that support this stage focus on evaluating the project’s status, managing the artifacts used to monitor the project’s progress, managing and controlling changes, removing impediments, and addressing issues encountered along the way.

• Evaluating Project Status and Manage Artifacts – As a project’s status evolves over time, the project manager needs to ensure the project meets its milestones and stakeholder expectations. In this section, you will explore the development of project metrics and tools to analyze and reconcile variances, identify and tailor artifacts needed to monitor and track the project, and continually assess the effectiveness of artifact management.
• Planning and Controlling Changes – Change is inevitable; therefore, planning and controlling changes in a project are critical because they help maintain the integrity of the project while supporting adaptability in a dynamic environment. This is achieved by developing and executing the change control process, which systematically and transparently manages change and ensures the project objectives are not compromised.
• Removing Impediments and Managing Issues - The project team generates most of the business value; therefore, it is important for the project manager to maximize delivery by removing anything that hinders the team’s progress. This includes solving problems and removing obstacles that may be hampering the team’s work. By resolving or easing these impediments, the team can deliver value to the business faster. You will explore different tools and techniques to evaluate the impact of impediments, prioritize and highlight them, and consider the value of collaborating with relevant stakeholders on an approach to resolve issues.
   

Lesson 8: Business Environment Dynamics, Continuous Improvement and Closure

Projects operate in a changing business environment. High-performing teams build in continuous improvement and disciplined closure to convert delivery into sustained benefits and reusable organizational knowledge. This means the project manager needs to evaluate changes in the external business environment to support organizational change, maintain quality through continuous improvement, and consider all aspects of project closure, which will be explored in this lesson.

• Evaluating External Business Environment Changes – In this section, the tools and techniques used to reassess and help ensure value is consistently delivered include the project manager surveying changes to the external business environment, assessing and prioritizing the impact on project scope and backlog based on those changes, and continually reviewing the external business environment.
• Supporting Organizational Change – The project manager is seen as a change agent because projects bring change to the people in the organization, which means considering people from a different perspective by understanding what motivates them and what causes resistance to change. Keeping this in mind, the project manager needs to assess the organizational culture and evaluate the impact of organizational change on the project to determine the required actions to ensure value is delivered in line with stakeholders' expectations and the project's objectives.
• Continuous Improvement – This is one of the hallmarks of being a project manager because projects inherently bring a lot of change to an organization; therefore, ensuring the organization learns from what went well and from areas for improvement is documented through lessons learned, identifying updates that may be needed to organizational process assets (OPAs) and enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) throughout the lifecycle of the project and again at closure.
• Managing Closures – Managing closure means ensuring the project or phase/release/iteration is formally completed, accepted, transitioned, and archived so the organization can realize and sustain the intended value and release people and funds as needed. This section outlines the criteria for successfully closing the project or phase, validates readiness for transition, obtains project stakeholder approval for completion, and concludes activities to close the project or phase.
   

Lesson 9: Next Steps

In closing out the course, you will have a chance to review the steps to take as you prepare to sit the PMP^® exam and to obtain further guidance from your ATP Instructor. Preparing for the exam requires structure, consistency, and a study approach you can sustain over time, and this lesson guides you on that path.