★ Must-know
📌 Operational work is ongoing, whereas project work has a definite end.
📌 In a matrix organization, team members report to both a functional manager and a project manager and perform both departmental and project work.
📌 In a strong matrix, the project manager holds authority; in a weak matrix, the functional manager holds authority and the project manager acts as a coordinator or escalator; in a balanced matrix, authority is shared equally.
Further detail
The project manager is responsible for achieving project objectives, which may be defined at a high level initially and detailed as the project progresses.
Management by objectives establishes clear, concise, well-articulated, realistic objectives, reviews progress periodically, and implements corrective actions when deviations are observed.
📌 A change to one project constraint can affect other constraints, so the project manager evaluates change impacts across all constraints through integrated change control.
📌 A project may fail if stakeholders are uninformed, their input is not solicited, or their needs and expectations are not satisfied, so the project manager analyzes and manages their needs and influence throughout the project lifecycle.
Projects end; operations continue.
★ Must-know
📌 The product lifecycle starts when a new product is conceived and ends when it is withdrawn, whereas a project lifecycle runs from project initiation to closure to produce project deliverables.
The process groups are:
Initiating formally authorizes a project, provides the project manager with information to begin, creates the project charter, identifies stakeholders and their high-level needs, and produces a stakeholder-management strategy.
Planning organizes the project before work begins, assesses whether the team can achieve the objectives, evaluates the knowledge areas, and creates a roadmap for successful completion.
Executing completes the work in the latest revision of the project management plan to meet project objectives, focusing on managing people, following processes, and distributing information.
Monitoring and controlling measures project performance against the project management plan and addresses change requests, corrective and preventive actions, and defect repair.
📌 A project is closed only after project closure is completed, formal acceptance of the project product is received from the customer, other stakeholders, or sponsor, and the administrative closure work is finished; the project manager can then release resources who helped close it.
Further detail
A project lifecycle may include additional or fewer steps depending on the industry.
🔄 The process sequence is:
The project manager is assigned during project initiation.
High-level planning during initiation creates a high-level work breakdown structure, performs order-of-magnitude estimating, and identifies high-level risks to support the project charter's objectives, milestone schedule, and initial budget.
Planning produces a project management plan and project documents, combines individual management plans into the overall plan, and should be iterative with a level of detail appropriate to the project.
Planning covers:
📌 Projects that cannot be planned in full detail at the start may be organized by phases, and the project manager compiles the plan using stakeholder input, historical records, and company policies, then accommodates changes as they occur.
Start, plan, act, check and act, end.
★ Must-know
The project manager manages the project to meet its objectives and is accountable for project success or failure.
A sponsor champions and advocates for a project, gathers organizational support, ensures buy-in, provides funding and the project statement of work, and may specify initial scope, milestones, key events, or the end date.
📌 A functional manager owns resources in a department and generally directs its technical work; in a matrix organization direction is shared with the project manager, in a project-centric organization the project manager directs the work, and in a functional organization the functional manager directs it.
Further detail
The project manager is assigned no later than initiation, helps write the project charter, leads project planning, and selects appropriate processes for the project.
The project manager coordinates stakeholders and team interactions, manages communication and team issues, analyzes constraints and assumptions, identifies activity dependencies, and helps the team during execution.
The project manager controls performance against the plan, uses metrics to detect variances and trends, manages change requests as authorized, and works with the team to resolve deviations and risks.
A program manager manages related projects to achieve coordinated results, align projects with organizational strategic goals, adjust projects for the program's benefit, and guide project managers.
During planning, the sponsor provides time, may review the work breakdown structure, supplies risks, determines management reporting needs, provides expert judgment, helps evaluate trade-offs, and approves the final project management plan.
During execution and control, the sponsor protects the project from outside influences, enforces quality policies, helps resolve conflicts beyond the project manager's control, approves or rejects changes, and works with the project manager to monitor progress.
During closing, the sponsor provides formal acceptance of deliverables and supports collection of historical project records.
The project team helps identify stakeholders, requirements, constraints, assumptions, work breakdown structure, dependencies, estimates, and risks, executes project work, participates in meetings and improvements, and may recommend changes.
Stakeholders may contribute to the project charter, scope statement, project management plan, change approvals, constraint and requirement identification, risk management, and risk response ownership.
A functional manager may assign team members, negotiate resources, identify other projects that could affect the project, provide subject-matter expertise, approve the schedule and project management plan, recommend changes, manage functional activities, address team-member performance, and improve staff utilization.
A portfolio manager governs projects or programs at the executive level and selects projects based on value, potential return on investment, alignment with corporate strategy, acceptable risk, and other factors critical to organizational success.
A portfolio manager manages potentially unrelated projects or programs, secures executive support, seeks organizational value, and aims to obtain the best return from invested resources.
★ Must-know
📌 The scope management plan should define in advance the detailed processes for determining, managing, and controlling scope, and the project manager should seek formal approval of a clearly articulated scope.
📌 A scope change must be evaluated for its effects on time, cost, risk, quality, resources, and customer satisfaction, and approved through integrated change management.
Further detail
📌 Scope requirements should be gathered from all stakeholders because gathering them from only a few stakeholders or only the sponsor may lead to an incorrect scope definition.
📌 Gold plating, or adding extras beyond the agreed project work, is not allowed.
Integrated change management includes the change originator updating a change request form and tracking the change in a change control register.
Continuous scope monitoring is required to determine what is and is not included in the project.
Do all the included work—and only that work.
★ Must-know
📌 Product scope describes what the customer wants from the product, whereas project scope describes the work needed to deliver that product.
The scope management plan is created during project management planning and covers scope planning, execution, and control.
Requirements collection begins by identifying stakeholders and recording them in a stakeholder register, then gathering detailed requirements from them before project work begins.
Requirements collection techniques include historical-record review, interviews, focus groups, facilitated workshops, brainstorming, nominal group technique, Delphi technique, mind maps, affinity diagrams, questionnaires and surveys, observation, and prototypes.
📌 A request unrelated to project objectives or outside the project charter should be rejected, while a charter-related change should be discussed with the project sponsor for approval.
Further detail
For a new software application, product scope can be a workflow application that fulfills internal and external customer requirements; success is assessed by comparing the application with its requirements documentation and project scope statement.
A scope management plan answers how scope will be achieved, which tools and organizational resources are needed, and how scope will be managed and controlled.
The scope management plan may be iterated during planning: the project manager first decides how to define scope, then uses fuller project information to plan execution and control, and later planning decisions may revise the plan.
Project requirements may concern quality, business processes, regulation, compliance, or project management, and they should support stated objectives rather than be included merely because someone requests them.
📌 In the nominal group technique, participants rank ideas after brainstorming, whereas Delphi participants remain anonymous and review compiled responses until consensus is reached.
Group decisions may use:
Balancing stakeholder requirements means prioritizing requirements and resolving conflicts while keeping them within project objectives and balancing scope, time, cost, quality, resources, risk, and customer satisfaction.
Requirements traceability links requirements to project objectives or other requirements and is used throughout the project to analyze proposed changes to product or project scope.
A project scope statement can include:
★ Must-know
A WBS is created top-down by decomposing deliverables and the work required to produce them into smaller pieces called work packages.
The scope baseline consists of the approved project scope statement, WBS, and WBS dictionary.
📌 A deviation from the scope baseline requires a change request, which must pass Integrated Change Control before approved changes are added to the scope statement, WBS, and WBS dictionary.
📌 Verify Scope obtains formal customer acceptance of interim deliverables, whereas Close Project or Phase obtains final acceptance or sign-off for the project or phase as a whole.
Further detail
WBS creation involves the team, completes the first level before proceeding, makes each level a subdivision of the one above, represents the entire project across its levels, and excludes deliverables outside the project.
A work package can be:
📌 A WBS organizes project deliverables hierarchically and does not show dependencies, whereas an activity list is a list of actionables that may overlook deliverables and obscure how work breaks down.
The WBS dictionary describes each work package and can specify its start, schedule milestones, acceptance criteria, and other work-package information.
Verify Scope uses validated deliverables, the scope statement, WBS, WBS dictionary, requirements traceability matrix, and requirements documentation; its outputs include accepted deliverables, change requests, and project-document updates.
Picture the project scope as a hierarchy of deliverables, with each branch ending in manageable work packages.
★ Must-know
The schedule management plan establishes who participates in scheduling, the planning approach and organizational procedures, scheduling tools, how schedule deviations are controlled, estimation guidance, measurement units, reporting, and change control.
Define Activities breaks WBS work packages into activities that can be estimated, scheduled, monitored, and managed, using the scope baseline and an available project team.
📌 A mandatory dependency follows the natural flow of work or a contract, whereas a discretionary dependency is chosen by the project manager and team and can be changed to help compress or fast-track the schedule.
📌 A lead allows an activity to start before its predecessor is complete, whereas a lag is waiting time inserted between activities.
📌 Padding estimates is not acceptable; estimates must be reviewed periodically for achievability, padding, and risk, and the project manager is responsible for accurate and feasible estimates.
Further detail
📌 A milestone is an interim deliverable in the project schedule, whereas the timeline for an individual activity is not itself a milestone.
Project activities and milestones are sequenced in the order in which the work will be performed.
Network diagram methods include:
The project manager analyzes requirements, uses team input and relevant experience to create estimates, resolves differences, and produces realistic objectives.
Estimate to Complete (ETC) must be recalculated periodically to ensure sufficient time, funds, and resources remain available.
Hard dependencies follow necessity; soft dependencies follow preference and can be changed by the team.
★ Must-know
Estimating activity durations follows activity definition and sequencing and identification of each activity’s resource types and quantities.
Ideally, activity-duration estimates are made by the people who will perform the work; in practice, project team members familiar with the work often estimate them.
Padding is arbitrary extra time or cost added because an estimator lacks information, whereas reserves are calculated through risk management for identified risks and unknowns.
One-point estimating assigns a single estimate to an activity using expert judgment, historical information, or a guess, while analogous estimating uses expert judgment and historical information from similar projects or activities.
Parametric estimating calculates an activity estimate from relationships between variables and activity outcomes using historical records, industry requirements, standard metrics, or other data sources.
Three-point estimating assigns optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely time or cost estimates to each activity and uses an average or PERT-weighted average to produce a risk-based expected estimate.
🔄 Reserve analysis proceeds by: identifying risks during estimating, reducing or eliminating risks through risk management and Plan Risk Responses, revising the reserve for risks that remain
Further detail
Project resources include equipment, materials, and people, and resource planning and coordination help prevent resource shortages.
Duration estimators need: activity resource requirements, resource calendars, organizational historical data, lessons learned about activity durations, past project calendars, the defined scheduling methodology, enterprise environmental factors such as company culture, existing systems such as estimating software and productivity metrics
Padding is not needed when: estimators have a WBS, estimators have the WBS dictionary, time and cost reserves are identified through calculations, risks and unknowns are identified
The project manager: provides sufficient information to estimate each activity, calibrates with estimators how refined estimates can be, validates estimates, prevents padding, formulates reserves, records assumptions for later review
One-point estimates can conceal risks, reduce trust and buy-in, encourage padding, and lead estimators to protect themselves against project managers; they are suitable for projects that do not require a detailed, highly reliable schedule.
Regression analysis models the impact of a variable on an activity with a mathematical formula, while a learning curve represents improved efficiency as experience increases.
A heuristic is a rule of thumb; the 80/20 Pareto principle example states that 80% of quality problems are caused by 20% of potential problem sources.
Transparent risk reserves protect the estimate; hidden padding distorts it.
★ Must-know
📌 Total float is the delay allowed without delaying the project end date, free float is the delay allowed without delaying a successor’s early start, and project float is the delay allowed without delaying an externally imposed completion date.
📐 Formula - Float can be calculated as or , and both expressions give the same result.
📌 Crashing trades time for money while maintaining project scope, and it always increases cost.
Further detail
📌 A near-critical path has a duration close to the critical path, and the closer their durations are, the greater the project risk; both paths require monitoring and control to avoid completion delays.
📌 Fast tracking performs critical-path activities in parallel that were planned in series and can cause rework, increase risk, and require more communication attention.
Resource leveling produces a resource-limited schedule and, when resources are limited, lengthens the schedule and increases cost and other constraints.
🔄 The critical chain method: assigns activities as late as possible while meeting the end date, adds resource dependencies, calculates the critical chain, places duration buffers at critical milestones, manages buffers to protect milestone dates
📌 A milestone chart displays events and supports reporting to management and customers, whereas a bar chart supports progress reporting and control but is a weak planning tool and is not a project management plan.
📌 Schedule control identifies causes and sources of change; if the project can no longer meet the agreed schedule baseline, the project manager may recommend terminating it before further company time is wasted.
★ Must-know
The cost management plan covers cost planning, management and control, and cost variances, and specifies estimate formats and accuracy, performance tracking and reporting, direct and indirect cost definitions, expenditure caps, and cost-change control procedures.
Life cycle costing considers the product’s whole-life cost, whereas project cost alone does not include the product’s later maintenance costs.
Variable costs change with the amount of work, whereas fixed costs do not vary and include setup costs, working capital, and lease costs.
Direct costs can be attributed to project work, whereas indirect costs are overhead costs that cannot be assigned to a specific project or activity and may serve multiple projects.
🔄 Bottom-up estimating: estimates each activity or work package, rolls the estimates up into control units, combines them into the overall project estimate
📌 Contingency reserves cover known risks remaining after risk responses, whereas management reserves cover unknown risks.
The cost budget equals the cost baseline plus management reserves.
🔄 Budget cost aggregation proceeds by: rolling activity costs into work-package costs, rolling work-package costs into control-account costs, rolling control-account costs into project costs, adding contingency reserves to the cost baseline, adding management reserves last
The Determine Budget process produces the cost baseline, while the cost budget represents the total money the organization should allocate for the project.
Further detail
Cost estimates are generally created from activities, but in large projects they may be created at control-account level, which is equal to or higher than a work-package level.
Estimate-cost inputs include:
Cost estimates become more accurate as a project progresses, so estimate ranges are broad early and narrow at later stages.
A rough order of magnitude estimate is generally made during project initiation and typically ranges from ±50%, depending on how much the team knows about the project.
A budget estimate is made during project planning and ranges from -10% to +25%.
★ Must-know
📌 The project manager has ultimate responsibility for product or project quality, while the entire organization also has quality-related responsibilities.
📌 Plan Quality defines quality for the project and identifies how it will be achieved; Perform Quality Assurance checks that planned processes are followed while project work is underway; Perform Quality Control examines actual deliverables for correctness and compliance with planned quality levels.
The objective of Plan Quality is to identify relevant organizational and industry practices, standards, and quality requirements for the project, its product, and project management efforts.
The output of Plan Quality is a Quality Management Plan.
🔄 Quality planning proceeds by: checking compliance with organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors, planning to meet customer quality standards, defining project-specific standards and procedures without violating other standards, determining the work needed to meet the standards, specifying measurements and their frequency to ensure compliance
Further detail
Quality management includes:
Philip Crosby promoted:
Joseph Juran defined quality as fitness for use, advocated top-management involvement in quality issues, and propagated Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 principle.
W. Edwards Deming propagated the 14 points of quality management and the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.
Gold plating adds functionality, higher-quality parts, extra scope, or higher performance beyond what the customer requires, and is not recommended because the team may misjudge what the customer values and create an expectations gap.
★ Must-know
📌 Control charts are set up during Plan Quality and used during Perform Quality Control to plot samples and determine whether process results are within control limits.
📌 A process is out of control if a data point falls outside control limits or if non-random data points occur, even within those limits; data outside specification limits indicate that the process is producing defects.
Further detail
📌 The rule of seven is a heuristic in which seven non-random data points on one side of the mean may signal that a process is out of control even when all points are within control limits.
📌 Statistical sampling is used when auditing an entire population would take too long, cost too much, or be destructive; sample size and measurement frequency are set during Plan Quality, while sampling occurs during Perform Quality Control.
SIPOC: Supplier, Inputs, Process, Output, Customer.
★ Must-know
Plan Quality produces: a Quality Management Plan, quality metrics, a checklist, a process improvement plan, updates to the project management plan and project documents
The seven basic tools of quality are:
Stakeholder analysis identifies stakeholders and assesses their impact or influence on the project using sources such as the project charter, past project records, brainstorming, interviews, and suggestions from newly identified stakeholders.
The stakeholder register compiles stakeholder information and is an output of the Identify Stakeholders process.
📌 The stakeholder management strategy, an output of Identify Stakeholders, determines whether stakeholders are managed individually or in groups and accounts for both positive and negative effects of their involvement.
Further detail
Perform Quality Assurance uses: tools and techniques from Plan Quality and Perform Quality Control, quality audits, process analysis
Quality audits assess compliance with company policies, standardized practices, and procedures, and determine whether those practices and procedures are efficient and effective.
Process analysis is planned at specified project points and identifies process improvements as part of continuous improvement.
Perform Quality Assurance produces: change requests, updated standards and processes, updates to the project management plan and project documents
Assurance examines work processes; control examines deliverables.
★ Must-know
📌 Interactive communication involves an exchange and response, push communication sends information without expecting feedback, and pull communication places information centrally for recipients to retrieve.
📐 Formula - The number of communication channels among people is .
Further detail
About 55% of all communication is nonverbal.
Project managers spend about 85–90% of their time communicating.
Effective listening involves observing the speaker’s gestures and facial expressions, thinking before responding, and actively confirming attention, expressing agreement or disagreement, or asking for clarification.
A communication model comprises a sender, a message, and a receiver; the sender encodes the message, the receiver decodes it, and factors such as education, language, and culture can create noise.
📌 Meetings should have a time limit, a specific purpose and agenda distributed beforehand, the right attendees, assigned action owners and deliverable dates, and documented minutes; recurring meetings should be scheduled in advance.
📌 A status report compares current performance with the performance measurement baseline, a progress report describes work accomplished, a trend report shows performance direction, a forecasting report projects future status, a variance report compares actuals with baselines, and an earned value report integrates scope, cost, and schedule measures.
Interactive communication invites a response; push sends without expecting one, while pull makes recipients retrieve information.
★ Must-know
📌 A threat is an event that can negatively affect a project, whereas an opportunity is an event that can positively affect it.
Risk tolerance is the degree or level of risk considered acceptable, whereas a risk threshold is the specific point at which risk becomes unacceptable.
The six risk management processes are:
The risk register is a living project document that records risks, potential responses, root causes, and updated risk categories and is maintained throughout the project lifecycle.
📌 Qualitative risk analysis subjectively assesses risks, while quantitative risk analysis examines their probability and impact numerically to estimate exposure, effects on objectives, and potential cost or schedule reserves.
📌 Threat responses are avoid, mitigate, and transfer; opportunity responses are exploit, enhance, and share; acceptance can apply to both threats and opportunities.
Further detail
Up to 90% of threats identified and investigated through risk management can be eliminated.
Risk categories include: external risks involving government, regulation, the environment, and markets, internal risks involving service, customer satisfaction, cost, and quality, technical risks involving technology changes, unforeseeable risks
📌 Business risk can result in either gain or loss, whereas pure (insurable) risk results only in loss.
Monte Carlo analysis simulates project cost or schedule results using the network diagram and project estimates, requires a computer program, and produces a probability distribution that can estimate completion dates, costs, critical-path likelihood, and cost or schedule impacts.
Residual risks remain after response planning, secondary risks arise from implementing responses, and risk triggers are events that activate contingency responses.
Plan, identify, analyze qualitatively, analyze quantitatively, respond, then monitor and control.
★ Must-know
📌 Contracts must be formal and legally binding, and a change management procedure is the only way to add an activity that is not already included in the contract.
Make-or-buy analysis determines whether the organization should perform project work itself or procure some or all of it from outside sources.
An organization should consider making the work itself when: it has an idle plant or workforce, the work involves proprietary information or procedures, it wants to retain control
The three types of procurement statements of work are:
Further detail
📌 In centralized contracting, one procurement department handles procurements across projects; in decentralized contracting, a procurement manager is assigned full-time to one project and reports directly to its project manager.
Organizations may buy services or products from outside sources to decrease project constraints.
Design statements of work are most commonly used in construction and equipment purchasing, while performance and functional statements of work are used in areas not previously undertaken, such as information systems, information technology, and research and development.
Plan procurements, conduct them, administer them, then close them.
★ Must-know
📌 A fixed-price contract is suited to well-defined requirements and sufficient competition to establish a fair and reasonable price; the seller bears costs above the agreed price, so the buyer has the least cost risk.
📌 Fixed-price incentive fee contracts adjust seller profit according to performance targets, fixed-price award fee contracts add a predetermined award apportioned by performance, and fixed-price economic price adjustment contracts allow price adjustments for future economic uncertainty in multiyear contracts.
📌 A single-source procurement contracts directly with a preferred seller without the procurement process, whereas a sole-source procurement has only one available source.
🔄 Conducting procurements involves:
Procurements close when the contract is completed or terminated, and closure includes product verification, negotiated settlement, financial closure, procurement audit, record updates, final contract performance reporting, lessons learned, and a procurement file.
Further detail
The project manager selects a contract type based on factors including the product or service, completeness of the statement of work, buyer effort and expertise, incentives, and enterprise environmental factors.
A fixed-price contract is inappropriate when either party lacks the expertise or past experience to prepare the procurement statement of work or lacks detailed accounting records.
A purchase order is the simplest fixed-price contract and is unilateral rather than bilateral.
📌 A cost contract pays no seller fee; a cost-plus percentage-of-cost contract pays costs plus a percentage fee; a cost-plus fixed-fee contract pays actual costs plus a fee fixed before work begins; a cost-plus incentive-fee contract adjusts the fee according to performance objectives and shares savings or overruns; and a cost-plus award-fee contract pays costs and a base fee plus a predetermined performance award.
Procurement documents should include: seller background information, response procedures, preparation guidelines, formats, source selection criteria, the procurement statement of work, proposed legal and business terms and conditions
Source selection criteria can include:
★ Must-know
Stakeholder analysis identifies potential stakeholders and their roles, interests, knowledge, expectations, and influence; assesses their potential impacts; classifies them; determines likely reactions; and plans strategies to increase positive support and reduce negative influence.
Stakeholder engagement levels are unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, and leading; an engagement assessment matrix records current engagement as C and desired engagement as D.
Managing stakeholder engagement involves communicating and working with stakeholders to meet their needs and expectations, address issues, and build appropriate engagement throughout the project lifecycle.
Further detail
📌 Stakeholders may be classified using power/interest, power/influence, and power/impact grids, or the salience model, which categorizes stakeholders by power, urgency, and legitimacy.
The stakeholder register records stakeholder information, requirements, and classifications, and should be updated regularly as an iterative process.
Stakeholder influence is highest at the start of a project and decreases as the project progresses.
Controlling stakeholder engagement monitors stakeholder relationships and adjusts engagement strategies and plans.
Identify stakeholders, plan engagement, manage it, then monitor it.
| Technique | Approach | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Fast tracking | Run critical-path activities in parallel | Can cause rework and increase risk |
| Crashing | Trade time for money while maintaining scope | Always increases cost |
| Method | Direction | Recipient action |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive | Two-way exchange | Responds to the information |
| Push | One-way sending | Receives without expected feedback |
| Pull | Information placed centrally | Retrieves needed information |
Take a 11-question practice quiz on Project Management Foundations, with every answer explained.
1. Which characteristic distinguishes a project from ongoing operational work?
2. A project manager must balance limited time and funding against scope and quality demands. Who determines the priorities among these competing constraints?
Memorize the key concepts of Project Management Foundations with 10 flashcards.
What defines a project in terms of duration and output?
It is a temporary effort with a definite start and end that creates a unique product, service, or result.
What distinguishes operational work from project work?
Operational work is ongoing, whereas project work has a definite end.
When does the product lifecycle begin and end?
It begins when a new product is conceived and ends when it is withdrawn.
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