PMP
Coming Soon
Expected availability announced soon
This course is in active development. Preview the scope below and create a free account to be notified the moment it goes live.
PMP®
The PMP certification course equips candidates with the knowledge to master People, Process, and Business Environment domains, applying predictive, agile, and hybrid methods to real‑world project challenges.
230
Minutes
180
Questions
$555
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
It is intended for project managers, team leads, or senior engineers who have at least 36 months of leadership experience with a bachelor’s degree, or 60 months with a secondary diploma, and have completed 35 hours of project‑management education. These professionals seek to validate their expertise, broaden strategic capabilities, and qualify for the globally recognized PMI PMP credential.
What's Covered
1
All domains and tasks in the PMP Examination Content Outline (ECO 2021): People
2
, Process
3
, and Business Environment
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
64 learning goals
1
Domain 1: People (42%)
6 topics
Team Building and Development
- Apply Tuckman's model of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning) to diagnose team dynamics and implement stage-appropriate leadership interventions that accelerate team maturity.
- Establish a team charter that defines ground rules, working agreements, communication norms, and decision-making protocols to create a shared foundation for high-performing project teams.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of team-building activities by assessing improvements in collaboration, trust, and delivery throughput and recommending adjustments to team development strategies.
- Design strategies for building and sustaining high-performing virtual and distributed teams by addressing time zone challenges, cultural differences, communication tool selection, and remote collaboration practices.
Leadership Styles and Emotional Intelligence
- Apply situational leadership theory to select the appropriate leadership style (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) based on team member competence, commitment, and the task context.
- Apply servant leadership behaviors to facilitate team empowerment, remove organizational impediments, and create an environment of psychological safety that encourages experimentation and learning.
- Assess self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management dimensions of emotional intelligence to determine their impact on team performance and stakeholder relationships.
- Recommend leadership approaches for complex project environments by evaluating organizational culture, team maturity, project complexity, and stakeholder dynamics to select the optimal leadership blend.
Conflict Management and Negotiation
- Apply conflict resolution techniques (collaborate/problem-solve, compromise, smooth/accommodate, force/direct, withdraw/avoid) by matching the appropriate technique to the conflict situation, stakeholders, and urgency.
- Evaluate conflict sources in project teams including resource competition, priority disagreements, technical disputes, and personality differences to determine root causes and select effective resolution paths.
- Apply negotiation strategies including integrative bargaining, distributive bargaining, and principled negotiation to reach agreements on project scope, resource allocation, and contractual terms.
- Design an escalation framework that defines thresholds, escalation paths, and resolution authority levels to ensure conflicts are addressed at the appropriate organizational level without unnecessary delay.
Stakeholder Engagement
- Apply stakeholder analysis techniques including power-interest grids, salience models, and stakeholder cube analysis to classify stakeholders and develop differentiated engagement strategies.
- Evaluate stakeholder engagement levels (unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, leading) using an engagement assessment matrix to identify gaps between current and desired engagement states.
- Develop influence strategies for resistant or disengaged stakeholders by analyzing their concerns, identifying shared interests, and designing targeted communication and involvement tactics.
Mentoring, Coaching, and Knowledge Transfer
- Apply coaching and mentoring techniques to develop team member competencies, including providing constructive feedback, setting development goals, and creating individual growth plans.
- Evaluate training and development needs for project teams by assessing competency gaps against project requirements and recommending appropriate training modalities and knowledge-sharing mechanisms.
- Design a knowledge transfer strategy for project transitions that addresses documentation, shadowing, cross-training, and lessons-learned capture to preserve organizational knowledge.
Motivation and Performance Management
- Apply motivation theories (Maslow's hierarchy, Herzberg's two-factor, McGregor's Theory X/Y, McClelland's acquired needs) to design recognition and reward approaches that sustain team motivation.
- Assess team member performance using objective metrics, peer feedback, and self-assessments to identify high performers, address underperformance, and align individual goals with project objectives.
- Formulate a team empowerment plan that delegates authority, defines decision rights, and establishes accountability structures to enable self-organizing teams in agile and hybrid environments.
2
Domain 2: Process (50%)
8 topics
Planning and Scope Management
- Execute project kickoff activities including reviewing the project charter, validating high-level assumptions and constraints, and establishing the initial project management approach with the team.
- Apply scope definition techniques in predictive environments including WBS decomposition, scope statements, and acceptance criteria to establish a scope baseline that controls scope creep.
- Apply scope definition techniques in agile environments including product vision statements, user story mapping, story splitting, and backlog refinement to maintain a prioritized and delivery-ready backlog.
- Analyze scope management challenges in hybrid projects and recommend strategies for integrating predictive scope baselines with agile backlog management across different project components.
- Design a scope validation strategy that defines formal acceptance processes, stakeholder sign-off protocols, and traceability mechanisms to ensure delivered scope matches agreed requirements.
Schedule and Cost Management
- Apply advanced scheduling techniques including critical chain method, schedule compression (crashing and fast-tracking), and resource optimization (leveling and smoothing) to manage schedule constraints.
- Apply agile release planning and iteration planning techniques including velocity-based forecasting, capacity planning, and rolling wave planning to establish delivery timelines in adaptive environments.
- Evaluate earned value management performance indices (SPI, CPI, TCPI, VAC, EAC, ETC) to assess project health and determine whether corrective actions are needed to recover schedule or cost performance.
- Determine the appropriate cost estimation approach (analogous, parametric, bottom-up, or three-point) based on project phase, available data, and accuracy requirements for budget development.
- Optimize project schedule and budget by analyzing tradeoffs between scope, time, cost, and quality constraints and recommending the approach that maximizes value delivery within organizational constraints.
Quality Management
- Implement quality management processes including quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control with appropriate tools such as statistical sampling, control charts, and inspection checklists.
- Apply continuous improvement practices including Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, kaizen events, and retrospective-driven improvements to systematically enhance project processes and deliverable quality.
- Evaluate cost of quality by analyzing prevention costs, appraisal costs, and failure costs to determine the optimal quality investment level that minimizes total project quality expenditure.
- Design a quality management strategy that integrates testing approaches, Definition of Done criteria, acceptance standards, and audit schedules across predictive, agile, and hybrid project components.
Risk Management
- Execute risk identification activities using techniques including brainstorming, Delphi technique, SWOT analysis, root cause analysis, and assumption/constraint analysis to build a comprehensive risk register.
- Apply qualitative and quantitative risk analysis techniques including probability-impact matrices, expected monetary value analysis, decision trees, and Monte Carlo simulation concepts to prioritize risks.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of risk responses by assessing residual risk exposure, secondary risks introduced by responses, and the overall risk profile impact of implemented mitigation strategies.
- Assess overall project risk exposure by analyzing the combined effect of individual risks, risk interactions, and project-level risk factors to determine whether the project risk level is acceptable.
- Design an integrated risk management strategy that tailors risk processes, establishes risk appetite thresholds, and embeds continuous risk monitoring across predictive, agile, and hybrid delivery approaches.
Resource and Procurement Management
- Apply resource planning techniques including responsibility assignment matrices (RACI), resource histograms, and resource calendars to allocate team members and physical resources to project activities.
- Evaluate procurement strategies by comparing contract types (fixed-price, cost-reimbursable, time-and-materials) and source selection methods to determine the optimal approach for project procurement needs.
- Apply agile contracting approaches including target-cost contracts, graduated fixed-price contracts, and time-and-materials with caps to manage vendor relationships in adaptive project environments.
- Recommend a resource optimization approach that balances resource availability, project schedule constraints, team capacity, and organizational priorities across concurrent projects.
Communications Management
- Implement a communications management plan that defines stakeholder information needs, communication methods, frequency, responsible parties, and escalation procedures for the project.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of project communications by analyzing stakeholder feedback, information gaps, and communication breakdowns to identify improvements in messaging and delivery channels.
- Design information radiator dashboards and reporting strategies that provide transparent, real-time project status visibility to stakeholders with varying levels of detail and technical sophistication.
Integration and Change Management
- Execute integrated change control by evaluating change requests for their combined impact on scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, and resources before routing to the appropriate approval authority.
- Apply change management techniques in agile environments including backlog reprioritization, sprint scope negotiation, and release plan adjustment to accommodate emerging requirements.
- Assess the cumulative impact of approved changes on project baselines, organizational constraints, and stakeholder expectations to determine whether project replanning or rescoping is required.
- Develop a project closure and transition plan that addresses final deliverable acceptance, lessons learned capture, resource release, contract closure, and benefits handover to operations.
Agile Delivery Practices
- Implement value-driven delivery by prioritizing features based on business value, risk reduction, and learning objectives to maximize the value delivered in each iteration or release.
- Apply minimum viable product and incremental delivery strategies to reduce time to market, gather early customer feedback, and validate assumptions before committing to full solution development.
- Evaluate agile metrics including velocity trends, cycle time, lead time, cumulative flow, and escaped defects to assess team performance and identify systemic process improvement opportunities.
- Recommend scaling strategies for large agile programs by evaluating frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS, and Disciplined Agile and selecting the approach that best fits organizational size, complexity, and culture.
3
Domain 3: Business Environment (8%)
3 topics
Benefits Realization and Strategic Alignment
- Apply benefits management planning by defining expected benefits, benefit metrics, target values, and a benefits realization timeline that connects project deliverables to organizational strategic objectives.
- Evaluate project alignment with organizational strategy by assessing how the project contributes to strategic goals, competitive positioning, and long-term value creation for the sponsoring organization.
- Recommend project continuation, modification, or termination decisions based on benefits realization progress, business case validity, and changing organizational priorities.
Organizational Change Management
- Apply organizational change management principles to support project-driven change by assessing organizational readiness, identifying resistance factors, and implementing change adoption strategies.
- Evaluate the impact of organizational culture, structure, and governance on project success and determine how to adapt project management approaches to fit the organizational context.
- Plan transition activities that ensure project deliverables are adopted by the receiving organization, including training plans, support structures, and operational readiness assessments.
Compliance and External Environment
- Implement compliance management activities that ensure project deliverables and processes meet applicable regulatory requirements, industry standards, health and safety obligations, and legal constraints.
- Assess external business environment factors including market conditions, competitive dynamics, regulatory changes, and technology trends that may impact project objectives and require adaptive responses.
- Formulate a project governance framework that defines decision-making authority, reporting structures, phase gate criteria, and escalation paths aligned with organizational governance standards.
Scope
Included Topics
- All domains and tasks in the PMP Examination Content Outline (ECO 2021): People (42%), Process (50%), and Business Environment (8%).
- Professional-level project management across predictive, agile, and hybrid approaches including team building, conflict resolution, stakeholder engagement, planning, executing, and delivering project value in diverse organizational and industry contexts.
- Advanced concepts in servant leadership, emotional intelligence, team performance optimization, virtual team management, negotiation, decision-making frameworks, and organizational change enablement as tested on the PMP exam.
- Process domain topics including project execution, scope management, schedule optimization, cost control, quality assurance, resource management, communications management, risk management, procurement management, and integration management at the professional decision-making level.
- Business environment topics including benefits realization, organizational change management, project compliance with external regulations, and strategic alignment of projects to business objectives.
- Agile and hybrid topics including scaled agile frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, Disciplined Agile), continuous improvement, value-driven delivery, adaptive planning, and incremental release management.
Not Covered
- Program management, portfolio management, and organizational project management practices that fall under PgMP, PfMP, or OPM3 certification scopes.
- Deep technical domain knowledge in specific industries (software engineering, construction, pharmaceutical) beyond what is required for PMP scenario-based questions.
- Tool-specific configuration, administration, or vendor-proprietary features for scheduling, collaboration, or project management software.
- Academic project management research methodologies and statistical techniques beyond earned value management, Monte Carlo simulation concepts, and basic quantitative risk analysis.
- Entry-level definitional knowledge covered by the CAPM exam; the PMP assumes mastery of foundational project management concepts.
Official Exam Page
Learn more at Project Management Institute
PMP is coming soon
Adaptive learning that maps your knowledge and closes your gaps.
Create Free Account to Be Notified