Pass Your PMI CAPM Exam Easy!

PMI CAPM Certified Associate in Project Management (PMI-100) exam dumps vce, practice test questions, study guide & video training course to study and pass quickly and easily. PMI CAPM Certified Associate in Project Management (PMI-100) exam dumps & practice test questions and answers. You need avanset vce exam simulator in order to study the PMI CAPM certification exam dumps & PMI CAPM practice test questions in vce format.

Describe Organizational Influences and the Project Life Cycle

4. Review the Project Life Cycle

In this presentation we're going to talk about the project life cycle. Did you know that projects have their own unique life cycle? that no two projects are the same, and no two life cycles are necessarily the same either. So let's look at this unique lifecycle. What is a project life cycle? Well, you know, it's unique to each project. It lasts for the duration of the project. And a project lifecycle really describes the phases that a project moves through. So you think about the phases of construction versus, perhaps, the phases that you might have for initiating or manufacturing one of those projects. Well, in construction, we might have the concept, the design, the drawing, the bid, the foundation, and so on, and construction. So each one of those chunks of work could be described as a phase; the sum of all of the phases is what comprises the project life cycle. So the project lifecycle is the sum of all of those different phases that go from the start of the project all the way to the end of the project. As a result, it will not have the same life cycle as construction or manufacturing or healthcare. It's unique to that particular project. So project lifecycles are unique and really describe the phases of the project. So what's a phase? Now, phase really describes the type of work that's happening in that chunk, piece, or period of the project. So phases typically create something. They describe the work, but they create something. And those things they create are key deliverables, and we might call those milestones. In fact, we typically do call those milestones. So phases really describe the work that's happening in that phase, and then at the end of the phase we get a key deliverable that is a milestone. The end of the phase typically creates a milestone. If we were to look at the phases in this chart, what we would see here across the bottom is the timeline. How long does the project last? The Y axis is going up. That is the degree of uncertainty that our stakeholders have, and that is the degree of uncertainty that the project will be successful. And it's also the amount of risk that we might have with the project at that time. So let's look at these two things here. Let's start at the very bottom of our chart, where we have the degree of uncertainty in our project timeline. Notice it's very low. Now this curve that's going from all the way in the corner up like a big S curve to "cost of change" represents how much it will typically cost to make a change in the project. So the further away I move from the start of the project, the more expensive it becomes to incorporate a change. So very early on in the project, where there is a lot of uncertainty, a customer could come to us and say, "Hey, I want to add these features." And I know you haven't done a lot of work yet, so I want to add these, and it shouldn't cost very much at all to add these to the scope. You may have to pay for the features, but you're not having to undo work or replay so early in the project. It's low-cost to introduce change. But if I'm almost done with my project, I'm building a house for you. And you come to me and we're almost done thelast week or so, and you say, you know what? I think I'd really like to add an indoor swimming pool. We're almost done building your house. So you want an indoor swimming pool? All right, we'll do it. But it's going to be very expensive for you to add that indoor swimming pool. Now, the other curve that we see going, starting high and going very low across the project timeline, is your stakeholder influence, project uncertainty, and project risk. So at the beginning of the project, stakeholder influence is very high. You come to me on day one and say, Hey, you know what? I want an indoor swimming pool. All right. Your influence is very high in proportion to our project timeline. We haven't done any work yet. We can figure that out. We can make an indoor swimming pool for you. Sounds great. So early on, your influence is high. But as we move closer to the end of the project, if we have a week left to go on that project and you come to me and say, "I want an indoor swimming pool," I might say, "it's impossible." I'm not doing it. I can't do it. You have to hire someone else to do that for you because your influence is very low because we're almost done building the house for you. Project uncertainty is very high at the beginning as well, because what we're describing here is that it's uncertain if the project will even finish because you're a long way from the end of the project. But the closer you get to the end of the project, the more likely it is that you will be able to finish the project. So the uncertainty begins to diminish. So, too, does project risk. The closer you get to the endof the project, typically risk diminishes. Now, I know there may be some cases where you have a triangular distribution of risk, like when you're switching from one operating system to the next or when you're planning for a big event like a grand opening or a trade show. So those are kind of unusual. However, for most projects, the closer you get to the end of the project, the more likely it will be successful, and the amount of risk you have diminishes and decreases. So that's typical for most projects. Let's talk about the product and project life cycles. So the life of the product, the life of theproduct describes how long will this product be in existence. And then the last product phase is the retirement, sometimes called the "sunset" of a product. So you think about video games or different models of cars or televisions or how one camera gets replaced by another—even operating systems. Remember Windows 95? Windows 98, Nt, or maybe Dos for some of you really old guys, myself included. So each of those had a shelf life, right? They didn't last forever. At some point, it was replaced by an improved and debatably better version of that thing. So that is how the product lifecycle is defined: how long something remains in the last product phase. Is the retirement a really nice way to say, "We're done with this; it's gone"? Well, a project life cycle typically doesn't worry about the product lifecycle. The project life cycle is that we're creating the product. And then once it's created, once the genesis of that product happens, someone else owns it, a product manager or operations or what have you. But it goes beyond the project's care. So product lifecycles and project lifecycles are two different things. How you know you're doing a project lifecycleis you're typically doing one of these MACDactivities that your project is moving something you'readding something you're changing or deleting. So MACD: move, add, change, and delete. And that describes typically an activitythat a project will do. Project-phase relationship So imagine that we're building a huge stadium in your town for soccer or football or whatever it may be. So we're building some type of stadium in your town. So there are these big, massive phases that have to happen for the stadium to be built. Well, this is talking about the relationship between these phases. So the first one is sequential, where we're going to build all of the foundation first, and then we'll build the skeleton of the building. And then we'll do the plumbing and electrical and so on, where everything is A-B-C and so on, so that it's sequential. that all of A has to be done before B can start. Well, we know, and you probably have seen this in your lifetime, that in those great big construction projects, the phases typically overlap because when we have half of the foundation done, we can be over here working on the other half of the foundation, and then our crew is over here building the skeleton of the building and putting up that structure. So that describes an overlapping relationship in manufacturing. Sometimes we have an iterative relationship where you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. So a good example here is that we're going to manufacture water bottles, all right? So we're going to manufacture these fantastic water bottles. and this requires the plastic. We only have so much room on the floor for the plastic to be built into this water bottle, but they manage to do it. So we have the materials for the plastic ready to go as soon as we consume—let's say enough to make 1000 water bottles. Then we have to replenish our plastic raw materials to create 1,000 more. So we have these iterations where the phase is to get new plastic materials to allow us to manufacture materials. And when we create so much of the end result, then we can go back and replenish. So it's iterative activities or iterative relationships where you're doing the same things over and over. Sometimes we see that as JIT, or just-in-time manufacturing, or just-in-time scheduling. So that's typically where we see iterative work. We're going to see that one as a special one that we'll see again when we talk about time. So we have sequential ABC overlapping, we allow things to overlap, and we iterate. We do iterations of the same type of work over and over. In project management, we have a couple of different life cycles to talk about. The first one is a predictive life cycle where you're making a prediction of what will happen. also called plan-driven Construction is a good example of a predictive lifecycle because the architect must first design the end result and then the foreman and project manager meet to discuss exactly what will happen. So it's plan driven.In older versions of software development, we might have done plan-driven work using a waterfall approach, where the activities stair-step down to the production of a deliverable, giving the appearance of a waterfall. A predictive model also predicts what will happen in each phase, and then changes to the scope are very tightly controlled. So you think about construction. We have an architect who designed this beautiful building. probably not going to be too keen on big changes happening to his building. And they have to go through an architectural review—maybe a city review. They must be stamped and approved. So changes are really tightly controlled, and so we're very resistant to change. Once we have a plan and a predictive lifecycle, we know exactly what's going to happen. Everyone's in agreement. We don't want a lot of changes in a predictive life cycle. I talked about this a little bit ahead of myself a moment ago with the iterative and incremental lifecycle where phases go through iterations. Each iteration creates a deliverable, like the finished water bottle; that would be a deliverable. A whole bunch of these are created at the end of a phase, and then a detailed scope can be elaborated for each iteration. So we're going to create 1000, and then we're going to create 500,000, and then we're going to create a million of these water bottles. A detailed scope is elaborated for each iteration, and then changes to the scope are expected. Based on previous outcomes, you may get a change request. So iterative or incremental life cycle changes are likely to happen. This is setting us up for PMI's newest certification, and it's called the PMI ACP, the Agile Certified Practitioner, and that's an adaptive life cycle. This is change driven.If you are doing Scrum, Lean, or XP, any of which are part of the adaptive life cycle, you don't need to know a whole lot about this for your exam. Basically, what's on this slide and in your workbook is what you need to know about the adaptive life cycle it's agile Project management. It means shorter project iterations rather than longer expected iterations, as with this water bottle. We're talking more about software development, where we prioritise our requirements before each iteration and changes are expected. Now that prioritised list of our requirements is called a backlog of requirements. So we have a product owner that works with the Scrub Master and then the development team, and they come together and prioritise what's most important in this project in this instance right now. So changes to the project are expected. So I would be topically familiar with each one of these. You may have one or two questions about adaptive iterative and predictive life cycles. I wouldn't be too worried about this stuff right now. This is still pretty high-level in our approach. Coming up, when we get to Chapter 4, we're going to get very specific. So you're doing great. Hang in there. We've reached the end of this section, which means that the next activity you have is a learning game. So you can hop out and do this learning game, and I know you want to do that. It'll just kind of reinforce what we've talked about so far. So that's the very next lecture that you'll see in the course. All right, good job! Hang in there. You're making progress, I know you can do it, and I'll see you in the next lecture.

5. Section Wrap

Hey, you did it. You've reached the end of this section, which is all about organisational influences. We talked about a lot of different things. A lot of the information in this section talks about organisational structure structures.Remember that we had the projectiles, the strong, the weak, and the balanced matrix? And then we have a functional matrix. There is no fun in the functional. So we talked about how your authority and power as a project manager come from these different organisational structures. We looked at organisational process assets, so they come from historical information, like past projects or lessons learned, or a corporate knowledge base where they're prepared for you, like a form or a template or guidelines. So, no OPA. Those are things that are helping you. They work in your favor, and they help standardise all of the projects. Then we had enterprise environmental enterprise eThese are all about the rules and the policies, standards, and regulations that you have to abide by. You have to follow these processes. I don't mean processes like PM processes; I mean processes that your company has set up, the guidelines, the swim lane that you stay in, and how you do an activity. So many enterprise environmental factors are critical. We're going to see that over and over, and we're going to see OPA over and over. So you've got it now, and that will save you time as we get deeper and deeper into the course. We also talked about project stakeholders and project governance. We know that a stakeholder is anyone who can positively or negatively affect the project. And it is people who will be impacted by your project. Remember we talked about that. It's the project team, the project manager, the project sponsor, customers, and users—anyone you can imagine interacting with on your project. They are a stakeholder in some capacity. We'll talk an awful lot more about stakeholders in Chapter 10 of the Pinbach on Communications Management and then in Chapter 13, the very last chapter of the Pinball Guide on the new domain, on Stakeholder Management. But periodically, we're going to see stakeholders throughout the scores. But those are the real areas. We'll focus on stakeholders. We talked about your project team. Are they dedicated? They're full-time on your project and part-time, where they might just be working part-time on your project because they have other projects they're working on or they have day-to-day activities they have to complete outside of your project work, especially if they're in a matrix or functional. We looked at the project lifecycle and how it is unique. No two projects have the same life cycle. The product life cycle is the life of the thing that we create, like a new car or a house or what have you. Don't worry a whole lot about the product life cycle. We will have some questions about the project life cycle. And this is where you saw that little tease about MACD. What's MACD It's when you are removing, adding, changing, or deleting. That's what most projects do. As one of those activities, we looked at the three different lifestyles. a predictive approach that's plan-driven or a waterfall approach where we know exactly what's going to happen through the project, like a construction project. We talked about iterative and incremental life cycles, where phases repeat through iterations and then iterations create deliverables. And we looked at an adaptive lifecycle that's change-driven, like Agile or extreme programming scrum. so adaptive life cycles There is a lot of information we talked about in this section. You're making great progress. You should be really proud of what you're doing. I know this is not easy to sit here and listen to this stuff and do these little exercises, but I hope it's enjoyable knowing that you're doing something that a lot of people say they want to do, but not many actually do it. So you are doing doing the work. And so stay focused and stay dedicated. I'm going to continue to encourage you as you move through this course because I know you can do this. I have confidence in you. All right, let's keep moving forward.

Examine the 47 Project Management Processes You Must Know for CAPM Exam Success

1. Section Overview

One of the most common things people say when studying for an exam is, "Oh, I really need to focus on these 47 project management processes." If you don't know those, it's just going to be horrible in the exam. Well, a couple of things. The 47 processes are the first, and if that's all you know, you'll probably fail the exam. Two, yes, you need to know the 47 processes, but you also need to know when you do a process, or what actions, circumstances, or events are calling you to do a process. It's more than just knowing the EDO of each process; it's knowing how to apply the process. So that's so important. Don't box yourself in and say, I'm onlygoing to know the processes in the EDOs. All right, that might be great, but you're not going to have a tonne of questions on what the input or the output of a process are. Remember those tasks that we looked at? That's what you're tested on in activities, but how you apply the process is so much more important. In this section, we're going to look at the processes. We're going to walk through all of these processes. So you'll see the entire range of processes that you might be tested on, or that come from the Pinbock. This is all based on those exam domains we looked at earlier, way back at the beginning of the course. Remember initiating 13% of your exams, planning 24% of your exams, executing 31% of your exams, monitoring and controlling 25% of your exams, and then closing 7% of your exam questions.So, yes, there's a lot of information here. Yes, you have to do these processes, but it's more about the application. So in this section, we're going to walk through this stuff. So initiating, there are only two processes, but that equates to 26 questions. In planning, there are 24% rather of your examis on planning and there are 24 processes. Isn't that interesting? So that's about 48 questions. In executing, there are eight processes, and those eight processes will be 31% of your exam, so 62 questions. And then in monitoring and controlling, 25% ofyour exam will be on monitoring and controlling,there are eleven processes to 50 questions. And in closing, there are only two processes left, and that's 7% of your exam. So there are 14 questions. So as we walk through this business, think about where I will spend the most of my time. Initiating, execution, closing all really important. So you think about the number of processes in relation to the number of questions, and that should be a real guide as to where you want to spend the bulk of your time. I can tell you which one you want to spend the least amount of time on: planning. All right, planning Well, that's a big one. Almost all of planning is to create a plan by looking at 24 processes to answer 48 questions. The one process and plan that's going to be really important I mean, they're all important, but the one that I would spend some extra time on is risk. because almost all of the risky processes come from planning. So what we're doing here is remembering our study strategy. The goal of this course is to pass the exam. So we're working smart. We're working towards our goal. We're doing some problem-solving here. I am not saying to ignore the process group. I would just put that towards the end of my prioritised planning or my prioritised study efforts. It's important. You need to know about planning. But it's 48 questions. Yes, the 24 processes If we go back to initiating, it's 26 questions on just two processes. So 48 to 24 processes, or 26 to two Do you see the ratio there? Initiating is very important. Know everything you can about initiating your exam. So we're going to talk about that kind of stuff in this section. But I want you to also look at that and think about what's good for you. Where do you stand, what's your experience, and what's your study effort?

2. Explore Project Management Processes

Let's begin by gaining a good understanding of project and product processes. Our focus is on project processes. Project management processes are really all about the flow of your project. That's what moves us along from initiating, through planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling, and ultimately closing. And we can do that flow of work in each phase of the project or in the project as a whole. So we'll see that as we move through the course or as we talk about the project timeline. Now, product processes: these are all about creating the project's product. So they're going to vary by application area. You won't have product processes that are the same in manufacturing and health care or in construction because the activities that you do to build a house are completely different than the activities that you might do to develop a piece of software. So product processes are what make them unique to your application area. Because it's difficult to test just one product process if you don't work in that area, you'll have very few questions, perhaps just one about a product process. It wouldn't be fair to ask me a lot of questions about health care processes or construction processes because I know very little about those application areas. So it's going to be pretty light and pretty high-level just to test you on the idea of where we draw the line between a project process, which you must know, and a product process, which is unique to the application area that you're working in. So product processes vary based on the application area. It's all about the execution of the project's work. So, building the thing your project will create—whether it's software, a house, or implementing a new procedure in a healthcare setting—that's all application area; those are all product processes. The project scope really defines the product. That's the idea of the product scope. What you want to create is symbiotic with the project scope, how we get there, and how we create it. So the product scope and the project scope are really tied to one another in what I have to create for you. Your product scope, what you envision And my project scope guides me to that result. So you think about construction, computer programming, network infrastructure, and designing a website, and with each of those we can very easily think about the end result of that work. So in construction building a house), computer programming (designing a piece of software), network infrastructure (making a whole wireless network for my campus), When designing a website, I want my customers to come and be able to search a catalog. So with all of those, we're thinking about the product—the end result. Now, the project scope, though, defines the product. So in construction, I have to rent pieces of equipment or buy pieces of equipment in order to complete the end result for you. Computer programming. I have to do some training in order to create the end result with you. You don't get the piece of equipment, and you don't get the knowledge that my team has through the training, but we need that as part of our project scope in order to build the product scope for you. So the things that I have to buy or the competency levels that we retain are those of the project team members or the organization, and that's part of our project scope, but it's separate from the product scope. So whatever we need in order to create the product, we need it. They're symbiotic. All right. I think you got it. Let's talk about some project management processes. I know you're excited to see that. So, project management processes: what is a process? A process is a set of interrelated actions or activities that bring about a prespecified result. So one of our first processes is to create the project charter. All right, there are certain activities that we'll do to create a prespecified result. the project charter. There you go. So these processes that we'll see throughout this course—really from this point forward—are talking about processes. These bring about a specific result. There are five groups of processes, and I bet you already know what they are, and you don't have to say them out loud. They are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling. and your favorite, closing. So our processes are distributed among those five process groups. Now, on the very last page, or one of the last pages in the course workbook, I have all of the processes in one neat table. So if you haven't downloaded that workbook yet, you might want to do it because it has all of your processes there by knowledge area and by those five process groups I just mentioned. So it's a handy reference. You don't have to, but it's pretty handy. So what's on that table, and what we'll talk about in this course the balance of the course), are the 47 project management processes. So you will come to love these processes. Well, maybe you'll just like them. You don't have to love them. All right, each process will have input. These describe the things that you need in order to do the actions and activities to create the output. So the input, the items required, the tools and techniques are how you do it, how you carry out that process. What are the actions and activities? The output is the prespecified result throughout this course. Just like I'm going to say OPA and EE, for organisational process assets and enterprise environmental factors. You're going to hear me say Edo. Edo means inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs, and we're going to look at every one of these for your PMP exam. You do not need to memorise the EDOs. You don't have to. You might have one or two questions about the EDOs. Is it worth your time to memorise the 47 processes and the EDOs for each one? If you have a lot of time on your hands and you have a really good memory, sure, go ahead. Probably, though, it's not going to be worth your time to do that. What you want to do, however, is become familiar with the processes and what types of things you'll need, how you do the process, and what the outputs are. Because the PMP exam will not be straightforward, what does this process produce? It's going to describe a scenario where you'll have to understand how to apply the process to get the thing that you need in that scenario. So they're very scenario driven.So I want you to be aware of it and understand that it isn't just a flash of memory. It's about applying these processes and knowing which process is appropriate for a given situation. So it's a combination of knowledge, experience, and a little bit of just intuition. So I want to help you. I can't help you with the experience, but with the intuition and the knowledge, we can do it together. So I really wouldn't memorise EDOS. I will pay attention to the characteristics of the project and really understand when I will use a particular process in a given situation. All right. All of these processes work together to create success for my project. So project success is going to depend on four key things. Are you using the most appropriate process? Just like we were talking about, you get to use the most appropriate process in a given situation. Are you using a defined and documented approach? Well, that's what you need to be doing in your plan. Or if you're using Agile, you're using a defined and documented approach. Are you complying with stakeholder requirements? Well, you better be, or you're going to be unsuccessful. If you aren't giving stakeholders what they expect as a result of the project, you're not going to be successful. You're not going to have any happy stakeholders. And then we have to balance our time, our cost, scope, quality, and risk. Project management processes are those that you can apply to every project in any industry. You can do quality control in construction, in IT, in healthcare and manufacturing, and so on. so you can apply it in any industry. You should not use every procedure. I get that question a lot. Do I have to do every process in the pinball machine? And no, you don't. You use the most appropriate process, and then you also want to think about the depth of execution that I need for each process that I select. If I'm in a very large, complex project, the odds are good that I'll be using a lot more of the processes than I would in a quick project to replace all of the monitors. So the project is going to influence what processes I use and the depth of execution that I use. The project management process groups are what the exam is based on. Earlier in the course, we looked at the distribution of questions based on the different exam domains. Well, now we're going to map those to the different process groups that you can expect. So we have initiated it; it's about 13% of your exam. Planning accounts for 24% of your exam, while execution accounts for 31%. Monitoring and controlling are about 25% of your exam. and closing represents 7% of your exam. Now, in the upcoming lectures in this section, we're going to walk through the exact processes that you'll see in each one of these, and we'll talk a little bit more about some study strategies as to which one of these areas you should pay the most attention to, and it might surprise you. All right, I'll see you in the next lecture. Bye.

3. Walk-through Initiating Processes

Let's take a moment and walk through the initiating processes. There are only two initiating processes, and so Pinbox three is the initiating process group. really easy here, David. Develop the project charter and identify stakeholders. Well, a charter is what authorises the project. It gives authority for the project to exist, and it gives authority to the project manager. It is important that every project have a charter. Now, in some companies, the charter might be called a different thing. It might be just the project assignment; it might be the contract. It could be called "maybe I've been a company." So they put it all together, where the project starter is whatever they call it. But the concept is the same for your exam. We're not going to call it anything else but the project charter. So in the project charter, it names the project manager and the role of authority, and "authorizes" is a keyword there; it authorises the project. Our second initiating processis to identify stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the project. In general, they can have a positive or negative impact on your project. So stakeholders are often called things like your customer, your managers, your project team, and end users. It can also be like the community where the project takes place, with different roles like vendors, inspectors, and things like that. Those are all stakeholders. Anyone that you have to communicate with about the project is probably a stakeholder. So we'll spend some time in this knowledge area once we get to Chapter 13 of the Pinball about stakeholders. But we want to identify stakeholders early in the project rather than later. These are the two Develop the project charter and identify stakeholders. All right, that's it.

Go to testing centre with ease on our mind when you use PMI CAPM vce exam dumps, practice test questions and answers. PMI CAPM Certified Associate in Project Management (PMI-100) certification practice test questions and answers, study guide, exam dumps and video training course in vce format to help you study with ease. Prepare with confidence and study using PMI CAPM exam dumps & practice test questions and answers vce from ExamCollection.