Cynthia Snyder Stackpole

The project management plan is the guiding document you'll use to manage, control, and close your project, and it's dynamic — it'll change throughout the project life cycle. The project management plan acts as an input to the initial planning process in each knowledge area. You may ask yourself, "How can this be an input to the initial planning process if outputs from planning processes are inputs to the Develop Project Management Plan process?

Your schedule is one of the most important documents you will produce. It’s important to know for the PMP Certification Exam and is a key component in managing stakeholder expectations. It tells team members when they will be performing work, the type of work they will perform, whom team members will be working with, and how long the work should take.

As you collect your requirements, the PMP Certification Exam will expect you to remember to document and organize them so that it’s easy to demonstrate when they are complete, as well as how they impact and interact with other requirements. Additionally, you want to think about how to manage and control your requirements.

The main techniques you will use on the PMP Certification Exam are to analyze, compare, and contrast the documentation to identify risks. If you see any inconsistencies, record that as a risk. For example, if your Assumption Log states that you will have an independent third-party vendor perform product testing but your budget doesn’t account for the associated costs, you have inconsistencies among your project documents.

Monitoring and controlling project work is something you need for the PMP Certification Exam and takes place throughout the project. It begins as soon as you start to formalize plans, and it doesn’t end until the last document is archived. Monitoring and Controlling Process Group. Those processes required to track, review, and regulate the progress and performance of the project; identify any areas in which changes to the plan are required; and initiate the corresponding changes.

Task Outlines allow you to focus on different levels of detail Project 2013. With the invention of computer outlining, the capability to focus on only certain portions of an outline comes into its own, because you can easily open and close an outline to show or hide different levels of information — or entire sections of your outline.

A maxim of project management says that things change: Tasks that you thought you could complete early can’t happen yet because money, people, or materials are in short supply. Or a task that you thought you couldn’t start until next July gets bumped up in priority when your customer changes his mind (again) about deliverables.

When you're ready to take the PMP (Project Management Professional) Certification exam, expect to see up to ten questions dealing with network diagrams, precedence diagramming, and scheduling issues. Here are some PMP details you need to know: FS = Finish-to-start FF = Finish-to-finish SS = Start-to-start SF = Start-to-finish Lead = The amount of time an activity can be advanced with respect to a predecessor activity Lag = The amount of time a successor activity is required to be delayed with respect to a predecessor activity A mandatory dependency is based on the nature of the work.

On the PMP certification exam, you'll see five to ten questions on variances and indexes. Here's fundamental information that project managers need to determine cost and schedule variances and indexes. For variance and indexes, always start with EV. When looking for information on schedule, use PV. When looking for information on cost, use AC.