Domain 2 of 3

Process

The delivery work itself, from choosing an approach and chartering the project through scope, schedule, cost, risk and quality, to change control, procurement and closure.

Concepts

~41%

Of the exam

Practice questions

Concepts in this domain

01The PMBOK principlesSix principles carry the mindset the eighth edition expects of a project manager. They set a direction for judgement, and none of them prescribes an action.02Performance domains and processesSeven performance domains name the areas a project has to perform in, five focus areas name the points in its life where work happens, and forty processes sit at the intersection.03Choosing a delivery approachPredictive, adaptive and hybrid describe positions on a range, and what places work on that range is requirement stability, feedback, constraint and the cost of a wrong turn.04Tailoring the approachDeciding which practices, artefacts and controls a particular project will use, at what formality, and being able to say why each one earns its place.05The project charterThe official document that creates a project, records the decision to do the work, and names the person who will manage it. A sponsor issues it, and the project manager may write the first draft.06Project scope managementEstablishing what work is in the project and keeping it there, which turns on the difference between product scope and project scope and on whether each change passed through a decision.07The work breakdown structureA hierarchical decomposition of the total scope into deliverables, governed by the hundred per cent rule and bottoming out at work packages with a dictionary behind them.08Iterative and incremental deliveryA fixed cadence, a variable scope and a usable result at the end of every cycle, together with the events that make the loop work and the reason each of them is timeboxed.09The adaptive backlogAn ordered list of everything the work might contain, kept in value order, detailed at the top and vague at the bottom, and reordered whenever the situation changes.10Schedule managementBuilding a model of how work unfolds in time from activities, dependencies and durations, then reading the critical path, the float and the price of every compression it offers.11Estimating techniquesAnalogous, parametric, three point and bottom up estimates differ in what they cost to produce and what confidence they can honestly carry, which is what makes one of them right for a given decision.12Adaptive estimating and velocityRelative sizing, the delivery rate it produces, and how a range for a future date is forecast from what a team has actually done.13Project cost managementHow a project moves from an estimate to a cost baseline to a funding requirement, where contingency and management reserve sit relative to each, and what it means to control spend.14Earned value managementPlanned value, earned value and actual cost, the variances and indices built from them, the forecasts that follow, and how to read each figure as a sentence.15Physical resource managementMaterial, equipment and facilities have lead times, storage costs and delivery windows that effort does not, and planning them as though they behaved like people is a reliable way to stall a project.16Project risk managementRisk is uncertainty with an effect on an objective, and the effect may be positive, so the same identification, analysis and response machinery serves threats and opportunities alike.17Project quality managementQuality is conformance to requirements and fitness for purpose, bought through prevention ahead of inspection, and measured by a cost of quality model that reaches past handover.18Kanban and flowVisualisation of the work, a limit on how much is started at once, and management of the queues between stages, which together control delivery where a fixed cycle does not suit the work.19Tracking adaptive progressBurn charts, information radiators and the small set of measures that tell a sponsor where an adaptive project stands, without requiring the team to produce a parallel report.20Hybrid delivery in practiceCombining predictive and adaptive elements on one project, the patterns that work, and the seams between them where most hybrid arrangements actually fail.21Integrated change controlWhy a change to a baseline is a decision, the path a change request takes from submission to a reissued baseline, who may approve one and how the same problem appears on adaptive work.22Procurement and contractsMake or buy as an economic decision, the fixed price, cost reimbursable and time and materials families and who carries the risk under each, the procurement cycle, and why a contract type is a relationship.23Agile contractingHow a commercial agreement is written when the scope is expected to change, and the mechanisms that let a buyer keep control of cost without fixing the scope in advance.24Issues and the RAID logRisks, assumptions, issues and dependencies in one place, why the boundary between a risk and an issue is the one that matters, and what keeps a log usable.25Project closureFinal acceptance, contract closure, releasing resources and archiving records, why a cancelled project is closed the same way, and the difference between a deliverable being accepted and a benefit being realised.26Lessons learnedWhy lessons are captured continuously, the difference between a project register and an organisational repository, and what makes a lesson reusable.

Try a question from this domain

A satellite ground station upgrade covers three components. The antenna assembly has an 11 month tooling lead and a late design change scraps a mould. The scheduling software has requirements the operators cannot describe until they use it, and those operators sit in the same building. The archive migration reveals more about the source data with every trial run. The sponsor asks the project manager to state whether the programme is predictive or agile. What is the best response?

AChoose the approach for each component at the level where the risk sits, and hold them together with an integration plan and a shared view of dependencies.
BRun the whole programme predictively, because the antenna carries most of the budget and a single approach keeps reporting consistent.
CRun the whole programme adaptively, since the organisation has adopted an agile operating model.
DDefer the decision until the requirements for all three components are stable enough to plan.

78 questions on this domain.

One per page, with a worked explanation.

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