Who is this book for?

There are some very specific requirements you'll need to have met if you wish to sit the PMP® exam and if you can go through the following questions and say to yourself, "yep, that sounds like me," then you are well on your way to a PMP® certification:

Still with me?

Good!

Take a look at the following questions. If you say "nope, that isn't me" to any of these questions, then this book is also for you:

If you answered no to the preceding questions, then we are moving in the correct direction.

Note

By the way, if you are new to project management, there may still be a way to use this book for certification. That certification is the Certified Associate in Project Management certificate, or CAPM®. The CAPM® was designed for project coordinators who also need to be able to understand the techniques and concepts to best assist the project manager. It's a different exam but you could use this guide to help you prepare, as the content is the same, but the exam content outlines are not. Be sure to check the CAPM® section at www.pmi.org to download a copy for your exam.

The PMP® exam is based on the best practices and processes found in The PMBOK® Guide – 6th Edition and other study materials. The exam is scored on three domains – people, process, and business environment – and that is also how the study guide is presented. The PMBOK® Guide – 6th Edition is presented in the order of the different knowledge areas found in most projects and includes topics such as scope, schedule, resources, and risk.

The process chapters are a comprehensive review of all the topics that can be found for all of the scope processes, all of the schedule processes, and so on. The issue most learners have with that way of learning is that they can't see the project through the trees. They can't put all the pieces of the puzzle together because they just don't see how they all fit together. It's kind of like mixing multiple metaphors – it just doesn't make a lot of sense to learn that way.

Instead, I want you to imagine putting together a puzzle you have never seen before. Some of it looks familiar, but you don't have the puzzle box and a picture of success to begin putting everything together. It would be really difficult to do that. Is it easy to put corners with corners and color-code piles? Sure. Could you put it all together without anything to reference? I'm guessing no – unless you are a jigsaw puzzle champion. If so, carry on! For the rest of us, it's tough to see what success looks like if it is so compartmentalized. That can lead to some confusion in your understanding.

With that being said, I realize that some of you may prefer to look at all aspects of each chapter as a singular entity and prefer to learn that way. Trust me, I totally get it! Otherwise, the Project Management Institute (PMI)® would have adapted their approach over the years to present it in the order of process groups. Where is the disconnect? The PMBOK® Guide – 6th Edition is set up like a cookbook. Want to make a dessert? That can be found in Chapter 10. Want to make a salad? That can be found in Chapter 2. That way, everything is compartmentalized for a better understanding of the categories of best practices across the entire project. Want to make an entire five-course meal? It's best to start at the appetizers and work your way through. I tend to look at cooking as a project I don't actually enjoy working on but use a lot of food references to explain things. I know – weird, right?

One of the reasons that PMI® sets the content up that way is because there isn't a suggestion of the order in which to do things. If you don't use procurement, you don't need procurement best practices. If you were using it as a companion in your day-to-day work and just needed to remind yourself what a scope statement is, then it's easy to find. However, the exam questions are all mixed up. There isn't an order. The hardest part of the exam is determining where you are in the life cycle and answering the questions accordingly.

The main point is that, in some cases, you need that compartmentalization to fully understand the concepts and in others, you need to make sure you understand how everything works together. There are 5 distinct process groups and 10 knowledge areas. All of these will be reviewed in Chapter 2, Introduction to Project Management, at a high level. How they work together is presented throughout the guide.

There is so much overlap with processes throughout this project that it would impossible for anyone to say, "go exactly in this order" – step one, do this; step two, do that. This is because every single project is unique and may have a need for a different order or configuration and maybe fewer processes. Thus, The PMBOK® Guide – 6th Edition is a way to present all the best practices without designating an order they must be done in. The same thing goes for this book. As I write this guide, it is only in a logical order if that is how you run your projects. Otherwise, it is simply organizing the best practices and processes by the group they are in, rather than me saying, "this is project management and always do it in this order."

The following diagram shows all the process groups and how they are all connected as a cycle, rather than a straight line:

Figure 1.1 – Process groups

Before we get too involved with process groups and knowledge areas, I think it's a good time to answer some of the questions I usually get in my classes.