The ONLY thing you need to pass the PMP?

hi everyone if you're trying to pass the PMP exam this year as a project coach myself I'm always scaring the web for the most useful tips to pass that PMP exam and recently when looking through the forums I found one comment that really really stood out to me and it was that there is only one document that you need in order to pass the PMP exam and everything else doesn't really matter and it's not what you might think it's not the PBX 7th edition it's not the process groups practice guide it's not the agile practice

guide it's not any of those things so I want to tell you what that is and I also want to give you a really quick overview on how to pass the PMP exam for yourself using this supposedly magical document well what is the document first of all it is the PMP exam content outline so the Eco uh that you'll find directly from PMI themselves why is it so important because it actually goes through exactly what the exam covers and really in quite a lot of detail and it's important because it comes directly from PMI themselves

who also do the exam so it makes sense that we really want to study the areas that they're telling us to study it's also quite an easy document to find if we go back to Google and just say PMI Eco PMP or the exam content outline for PMP it's the first or second one that comes up the first one is the PDF itself and the second one is the exam preparation page all the way down the bottom you can find the exam content outline that you can download for free directly from PMI now why do

I say there is a caveat and that is because it will go through the exact things that you need to know for the exam and there are domains the people process the business environment and it'll even go into those things in quite a lot of detail as you can see managing conflict leading a team setting a Clear Vision and Mission but there is one thing that it won't do and it won't tell you the specific techniques and all of the project management processes themselves how to go about creating them what to do in certain situations

the actual negotiating or influencing techniques the actual budget management techniques all the things that we need to do as project managers it won't go to that level of detail for that you probably need that project management education the 35 contact hours or the 35 professional development units if you're renewing your certificate with the exam content outline it also gives us the percentages that you need to pass for each area and I'll give you a caveat for this as well something that you're really going to need to know for people it covers 42% of the exam

the project management process covers 50% of the exam and the business environment which is ensuring value is delivered covers only 8% of the exam but what we really need to know with these percentages is that the overall pass in order to pass the exam it's still based on the overall score of 100% so if you get uh only 10% in this one but 50% in this one then even though you've technically failed for people you still could pass if you've got 60 68% now PMI doesn't reveal the pass in percentage but obviously the higher we

go the better you're going to be so just be aware even though they are separate it still is an overall percentage for you when you're passing the PMP exam now just for you let's go over these in a little bit more detail just a really quick overview of the people process and business environment so that you can get a high level idea of what's required when you're passing the PMP exam first of all for people we want to be managing conflict leading a team with our leadership skills are we servant leaders or are we directive

leaders if uh if there's something going wrong and we need to get it done quickly supporting team performance empowering team members and their performance so making sure that everyone has the tools to get the work done ensuring team members are adequately trained and if team members are are not performing then how do we assess that and then how do we get them the right training that they need building a team of the right people and if you've done your project management education you might be looking in an agile approach the t-shaped people or the generalizing

Specialists with one deep specialty and many varying interests or varying skills that's our ideal person to build a team with addressing and removing blockers for the team again in an agile environment with our daily standup we might reveal blockers or things that are stopping us from getting the work done and we can address that as project managers negotiating project agreements uh that might be with our schedule with the resources that we're getting from the business collaborate ating with stakeholders and with our stakeholder engagement or assessment Matrix we might assess our stakeholders by their influence on

our project and our impact on their business area and whoever has the highest influence and impact then we're going to want to collaborate with them the most building a shared understanding and this could be having a visible team area an open Team area where everyone can see we've got a Canan board on the wall perhaps we've got our risks on the wall so everyone can see May we've got a a brief schedule or a high level schedule so everyone can see if we're on track or off track engaging in supporting virtual teams now if we're

not collocated in the same area then maybe we we need to use video conferencing or telephony or telephones or those sorts of thing messaging like slack or maybe we need uh websites or web portals where we can share all of the project information defining team ground rules with a team charter so how are we going to work together together mentoring our stakeholders and our teams and promoting team performance with emotional intelligence making sure we're reacting in the right way now the next one is process and that's also quite big there are 17 tasks in the

process part of the exam content outline the first one is we want to execute our project so this is our project management process from start to finish how are we delivering the value that we're wanting to deliver execute our project with the urgency required to deliver business value we want to manage Communications on the project assess and manage risks and remember we've got the impact of the risk and the likelihood of the risk and we put those two things together to find out how severe our risk is going to be and how we need to

manage it engaging our stakeholders in the right way planning and managing managing the budget and the resources and maybe we want contingency reserves or management reserves as part of that planning and managing our schedule with a Gant chart usually or a schedule Network diagram planning and managing the quality of deliverables so uh making sure that they're meeting our customer requirements planning and managing the scope and all of these plans by the way come together in our overall project management plan so that's uh integrating all of those things together oh and here we are here integrating

the project planning activities all together with a project management plan managing project changes with a change management plan or if we're working agile maybe it's just a product owner who reprioritizes the product backlog if there are any changes planning and managing procurement for third parties who need to do the work managing project documents and artifacts the risk uh register the issue log our change management plan or our change log determining appropriate project methodology do we need to work agile for maybe we're releasing in increments small small increments or maybe we have a really big project

and we can only release it in one go at the end and that's our waterfall project so we need to determine that how are we going to manage our project establish project governance structure now remember we might be working in a strong pmo culture or we might be working in a startup where everyone has to do everything together and maybe a functional manager from that functional area has a high Authority and their respons for getting the change done so what's the governance structure manage project issues as they come up and ensure knowledge transfer with our

lessons learned and planned and managed project closure or transitions now the last one is the business environment now this is my favorite one because we're actually delivering that value that we're supposed to be delivering through our project and to do that we might need to plan and manage compliance what what do we need to be compliant with in our industry or regulations or legal things that we need to be compliant with as we're delivering our project we also want to evaluate and deliver project benefits and value are we measuring the right benefits and how do

we know when value has been delivered who's going to measure these things we can check this out with our benefits management plan that we create at the beginning of our project task three we want to evaluate and address external business changes so what happens if there's a change in the industry do we need to change the scope of our project and task four supporting organizational change this is a new one because change management organizational change management with things like the bridges Change Model you'll see in most project management education or Adar or prai these are

change management methodologies how do we get the business ready for our product once it's complete and that's a pretty brief overview really really good really good to know I highly recommend you get that exam content outline for your own study notes it will really really help you and of course combine that with some good project management education and you will do absolutely fantastically I know it I'll see you in the next video bye for now