Project Manager ExaminationStudy guide

Covers a project's defining characteristics of temporariness and uniqueness; the trade-offs that arise among the constraints (scope/time/cost/quality/resources/risk); and the role and responsibilities of the project manager (PM), framed as the judgment skill of choosing the optimal balance under a concrete situation.

Covers the project charter that authorizes a project's initiation; the project management plan that consolidates the overall execution approach; integrated change control (change request -> impact assessment -> approval), which centrally manages change requests; and configuration management, which maintains the approved baseline—framed as the appropriate decision procedure when a change arises.

Covers requirements gathering, which elicits requirements from stakeholders; the scope statement, which puts the boundary of the deliverables into writing; the WBS (work breakdown structure), which decomposes work hierarchically, and its smallest unit, the work package; and the 100% rule a WBS must satisfy—framed as the judgment skill of preventing ambiguity and gaps in requirements.

Covers scope validation (acceptance), in which the customer confirms whether the deliverables satisfy the requirements, and the judgment of detecting the signs of scope creep—an undisciplined expansion of scope—early and pulling the project back into a controlled process.

Covers activity definition, which decomposes a WBS work package into executable units of work, the four types of precedence relationship (FS/SS/FF/SF) that describe how activities connect, lead and lag, which pull work earlier or push it later, and three-point estimating, which derives a duration range from multiple estimates.

Covers how to compute earliest and latest dates via the arrow diagramming method (CPM) to identify the critical path (the longest path, where float is zero), the difference between total float and free float, and how to diagnose the way a delay on one activity ripples through to the overall project deadline.

Covers the difference and applicability of the two schedule-compression techniques, crashing (adding cost to shorten activity durations) and fast tracking (running normally sequential activities in parallel), the decision axis of whether added cost or added risk is more acceptable, and the principle of applying compression only to activities on the critical path.

Covers the accuracy-versus-effort trade-off among three estimating techniques—analogous estimating based on past experience, parametric estimating such as function-point analysis, and bottom-up estimating that sums individual work units—the finalized cost baseline, and the difference between contingency reserve for known risks and management reserve for unknown risks.

Covers computing SV/SPI (schedule variance/performance) and CV/CPI (cost variance/performance) from the three metrics PV (planned value), EV (earned value), and AC (actual cost), interpreting the results to forecast EAC (estimate at completion), and deciding on corrective action.

Covers the division of roles among the three quality processes—quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control—and the trade-off among the three cost of quality categories (prevention cost, appraisal cost, and failure cost), together with why preventing defects from being built in the first place minimizes total cost more than relying on inspection to catch them.

Organizes the strengths of each of the seven QC tools (Pareto chart, cause-and-effect diagram, histogram, scatter diagram, control chart, check sheet, and stratification) around the judgment of which tool fits the data at hand, and covers the abnormality-detection rules used with a control chart's control limits (points outside the limits, runs biased to one side, etc.) and the corrective action a PM should take afterward.

Covers clarifying roles with a RAM (responsibility assignment matrix) / RACI chart, what is happening on a team at each stage of the Tuckman model (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning) and how a PM should engage at each stage, when to apply Maslow's versus Herzberg's motivation theories, and judging when to apply resource leveling.

Organizes the conflict resolution techniques (confront/collaborate, compromise, smooth, withdraw, and force) around the judgment of which to choose given the nature of a conflict (urgency, importance, relationship), and covers situational leadership—adapting leadership style to team maturity and the nature of the task.

Covers identifying risks and recording them in a risk register, qualitative risk analysis (a probability/impact matrix) that ranks risks by multiplying probability and impact, and quantitative risk analysis (expected monetary value (EMV), decision trees) that translates risk into monetary terms to judge whether a response is worthwhile, building judgment for deciding which risks a limited contingency budget should be allocated to.

Covers the four threat response strategies (avoid, transfer, mitigate, accept) for negative-impact risks and the four opportunity response strategies (exploit, share, enhance, accept) for positive-impact risks, building judgment for choosing among them based on cost-effectiveness, alongside secondary risk created by a response, residual risk remaining after a response, and contingency plans for unforeseen events.

Covers make-or-buy analysis, which judges whether to perform work internally or outsource it, and builds judgment for choosing among fixed-price (FP) contracts, cost-reimbursable (cost-plus) contracts, and time-and-materials (T&M) contracts—each with a different risk-bearing profile—based on how firm the requirements are.

Covers RFI for gathering information on prospective vendors, RFP for soliciting proposals, weighted supplier selection criteria, and the post-contract flow of contract administration, change management, and claims administration, building judgment for supplier selection and contract management suited to the situation.

Covers stakeholder identification, which surfaces the parties who affect or are affected by the project; engagement level (unaware through leading), which measures the degree of each party's involvement; and the power/interest grid, which the PM uses to judge how to allocate limited effort across stakeholders.

Covers detecting early signs of resistance in stakeholders, choosing the right engagement strategy based on the power/interest quadrant, and techniques for visualizing expectations and reaching agreement to prevent expectation gaps before they occur.

Covers designing a communication structure that accounts for how the number of communication channels n(n-1)/2 among project participants balloons as headcount grows, choosing among push, pull, and interactive communication methods, and judging media selection to fit the situation.

Covers progress, status, and forecast reporting backed by evidence (backed by EVM), the phase gate, which judges whether to continue at the end of a phase, and countering optimism bias and delayed bad-news reporting.

Covers the skeleton of JIS Q21500 (the project management guidance standard, aligned with PMBOK): its five process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, closing), the ten subject groups (knowledge areas) that cut across them, and the role of integration management in binding the subject groups together.

Covers Scrum's sprint cadence for iteratively elaborating requirements while developing, the burndown chart that visualizes progress and the velocity metric for productivity, and the judgment of which lifecycle to choose—predictive (waterfall-style) or adaptive (agile)—based on requirements uncertainty.

Covers the go/no-go decision criteria for production transition and release—moving a project's deliverable into the production environment—the SLA as the agreed service level for operations, and the ITIL best-practice framework for service operation, together with how a project hands off to operations and maintenance after completion.

Covers project audit (independent evaluation and corrective recommendations) that assesses a project's management status from an independent standpoint, PMO (Project Management Office), which standardizes, supports, and controls projects across an organization, and IT governance, which steers IT investment direction for the organization as a whole—together, the perspective of running a project properly under organizational control.