Project Management Knowledge & Skills

By Christine Aykac and Meral Altinbilek

This book is meant for people who are:
•Working as a project manager
•Leading a team of professionals
•Overseeing the implementation of major changes
•Studying for their PMP® Certification
In this book you will find all-inclusive information on Project Management Knowledge and Skills. They will help you to initiate, plan, manage, control and deliver your projects successfully. Our goal is to offer simple yet comprehensive information about the key knowledge and skills every team lead and manger should have. You can also use this book as part of your PMP® exam preparation material, since it includes information on the updated PMP® Exam content outline (June 2015).
Good luck with your future projects!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Aykac
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781773020075

Christine Aykac

Christine has over 20 years of experience managing projects and providing assistance on effective utilization of technologies and knowledge assets. Christine’s experience enables her to utilize the most effective methodology for each project and to ensure the success of the teams involved. Further, Christine provides visionary solutions to complex business and technical challenges for management on critical issues relating to the implementation of new solutions. Christine works as a coach, facilitator and instructor and is very involved in developing certification training material, customized awareness programs and workshops on Project Management, Agile Management, Risk Management and Interpersonal skills development.

Book preview

Project_Management_Knowledge_and_Skills_Cover.jpg

Project Management

Knowledge and Skills

First Edition

Christine Aykac,

PMP, PMI-RMP, PMI-ACP, PRINCE2, PRINCE2 Agile

Meral Altinbilek,

M.Sc., P.Eng., PMP, PMI-ACP

Acknowledgements

To all of the instructors who are delivering our PMP Exam Training course material globally, we appreciate your valuable feedback.

To our students who participated in our courses and workshops over the years, your feedback has encouraged us to write this book and there will be others to come. Thank you!

To Launi Whiting, our exceptional editor, our appreciation is limitless. Launi has worked with us for almost 20 years and produced exam preparation materials and countless workshops on soft skills. We truly appreciate her due diligence, insightful ideas and guidance. Her skillful editing made it possible to complete this book. It has been a pleasure working with Launi!

Finally, yet most importantly, we are grateful to our families for their endless support. Special thanks to Dillon Aykac for cover design and forever thanks to our husbands for their helping hand every step of the way including frequently transporting us between Canada and US!

About this book

This book is for you if you are preparing for your Project Management Professional (PMP) certification exam, working as a project manager, managing an operation, leading a team, or overseeing an implementation of changes.

The goal of this book is to help you understand the knowledge and skills required for you to pass the PMP exam, manage your projects and to assist you in the day-to-day management of your operation. It has been designed to offer simple yet comprehensive information about key knowledge and skills every project manager should have. Furthermore, you can also use this book as a guideline for your day-to-day management activities.

How did we choose these topics?

This book has been written to reflect the latest changes to the PMP Exam Content Outline. In addition, we ensure that our content is in line with the latest edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)® Guide Fifth Edition and PMI’s reference material for the project management.

As a reference book, it provides educational content ensuring that project management practitioners have a book dedicated to the Project Management Knowledge and Skills, including the newly organized Cross Cutting Skills. This book should assist you in passing the PMP examination, as well as giving you all the necessary knowledge and skills to manage your projects successfully.

You should find that the knowledge and skills discussed in this book are defined in such a way that will allow you to get familiar with them right away. It is written so that you can skim through sections you are already familiar with and just concentrate on sections you want to know more about. We have expanded each domain area to provide you excellent reference materials and have included in-depth information in all knowledge and skills areas for project managers to successfully manage their projects from initiation to closing.

This book is unique in a way that it just covers key knowledge and skills required for project managers to be successful. It walks you through the project stages all projects go through, from initiating to closing. You should benefit by learning the most common cross-cutting knowledge and skills you need to manage a project, without involving tools and techniques or methodologies. Sections of this book are designed specifically to assist you in finding any topic easily. The knowledge and skills required in each performance domain are listed in alphabetical order to help you to quickly locate any topic.

How to use this book?

If you are using this book as reference material, follow the chapter information. Each chapter corresponds to one of the project stages, also called performance domains. Chapter 6 includes all remaining knowledge and skills every manager should have.

If you are planning to take the PMP exam, this book follows the PMP Exam Content Outline structure published in June 2015. Read from beginning to end or read whatever you need help with.

The companion website, www.decodeseries.com, has been built to provide you additional support material, updates about the exam and our responses to frequently asked questions. Please check the website for the latest news.

We welcome your feedback about this book or other books and training materials we have published.

You can reach us through our website www.decodeseries.com for more information or send us an email at [e-mail] to provide your feedback. Please check the website often as we will be posting additional content and updates that supplement this book and other projects we are working on. If you prefer to be kept up-to-date about the changes to the book or the PMP exam, please register on our mailing list and we will send you information whenever we have updates.

About the Authors

This book is the first in a series of project management books written by experienced project managers and authors N. Christine Aykac and Meral Altinbilek.

Christine and Meral are committed to producing simple, easy to read and comprehensive content for project managers, line managers and team leaders. Each upcoming title will be focused on a specific area to provide valuable content to assist readers’ professional accomplishments. We hope that you will benefit from reading this book.

Meral Altinbilek, M.Sc., P.Eng., PMP, PMI-ACP

Meral is an experienced program manager and holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and M.Sc. in Operations Research.  Meral started her career as a teaching associate in the Industrial Engineering department and later moved to the industry as a project manager. Meral has spent the better part of her career in Toronto where she has successfully managed large and complex projects and programs in financial institutions, government and consulting organizations. Since 2006, she has been working in the US and actively involved in the project management community there.

Meral has established a number of PMOs throughout her career and participated either as a review board member or content developer in project management training and exam preparation materials. Meral enjoys the positive impact of program management to the firm’s performance by ensuring the programs and projects align with organizational strategy and goals across the enterprise.

Christine Aykac, PMP, PMI-RMP, PMI-ACP, PRINCE2, PRINCE2 Agile

Christine has over 20 years of experience managing projects and providing assistance on effective utilization of technologies and knowledge assets. Christine’s experience enables her to utilize the most effective methodology for each project and to ensure the success of the teams involved. Further, Christine provides visionary solutions to complex business and technical challenges for management on critical issues relating to the implementation of new solutions.

Christine works as a coach, facilitator and instructor and is very involved in developing certification training material, customized awareness programs and workshops on Project Management, Agile Management, Risk Management and Interpersonal skills development.

Introduction

Success in project management has traditionally been associated with the ability of the project manager to deliver projects within scope, time, and cost. The iron triangle was a very popular metaphor pointing out that the project manager is asked to reach a reasonable trade-off among various concurrent, heterogeneous and visible constraints making the project a success.

Over the years, the project manager is continuously challenged by constraints other than the measureable scope, cost, and time. Quality, communication, and interpersonal skills have become more important than keeping the scope, time and cost in line. For example, the ground rules for team behaviors and the internal and external communication needs have changed. You, as a project manager, may need to exploit your own prominent assertive or holistic attitudes based on your project, organization and the team composition where the nature of the project and the context at-large may be in conflict.

Today, most organizations see project management as a planning and controlling function and most PMO’s are obsessed with methodologies, processes, tools and techniques. Their primary focus is to establish standards for all projects to follow; assuming that all projects are similar and that you can apply the same standards to all projects. However, the research, Linking the Project Management to the Business Strategy (2007), initiated by PMI, found that most projects fail to meet their goals. According to Aaron J, Shenhar, They either do not meet time and budget goals, do not meet their business objectives, or both.

The result of this research predicts that, to increase the success rate of projects, the projects should be aligned with the business strategy of the organization. To be able to successfully accomplish this, organizations should improve their project management competitiveness.

Today’s efficiency and process-focused project management mindset would not be sufficient to achieve the expected business results. Therefore, PMI has expanded the PMP exam content to include knowledge and skills that are used to perform project management tasks and to complement the core project management domains.

In this book, you will find a comprehensive review of each knowledge and skill required to manage your projects successfully. If you are seeking to obtain PMP certification (updated in January 2016), you will find the latest information in the appendix.

Good luck in managing your projects successfully!

Project Management

Project management is a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish. It is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique, product, service or result.

Project management is realized through logically grouped process stages namely Performance Domains. In each domain, there are Knowledge and Skills required to achieve successful implementation.

Key elements of project management discipline are iterative in nature and provide a methodical approach to assure successful delivery of project objectives. There are groups of relevant activities applied in each domain to create tasks to be applied during each phase.

Key Elements of Project Management

Initiating (Chapter I)

Planning (Chapter II)

Executing (Chapter III)

Monitoring &Controlling (Chapter IV)

Closing (Chapter V)

Knowledge & Skills:

As we know, success or failure of the project is also related to knowledge and skills of the practitioner managing the project. Project practitioners identified these knowledge and skills as essential for their work. However, some of the knowledge and skills are specific to the phase the project is in and some of them are required throughout the project lifecycle.

Regardless of the project management methodology selected for the project, these skills are applicable to all managers, managing a project or an operations team.

Each knowledge and skills statement in this list is preceded implicitly by Knowledge of or Skills in, such as Knowledge of Benefit