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

01Choosing a delivery approachPredictive, adaptive and hybrid describe positions on a range rather than rival camps, and what places work on that range is requirement stability, feedback, constraint and the cost of a wrong turn.02The project charterThe document that brings a project into existence and names the person authorised to run it, issued by a sponsor rather than written into being by the project manager.03Project 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.04The work breakdown structureA hierarchical decomposition of the total scope into deliverables rather than activities, governed by the hundred per cent rule and bottoming out at work packages with a dictionary behind them.05Schedule 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.06Estimating 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.07Project 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 rather than report it.08Earned 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 rather than reciting the formula that produced it.09Project 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.10Project quality managementQuality is conformance to requirements and fitness for purpose, bought through prevention rather than inspection, and measured by a cost of quality model that reaches past handover.11Integrated change controlWhy a change to a baseline is a decision rather than an edit, the path a change request takes from submission to a reissued baseline, who is allowed to approve one, and how the same problem looks on adaptive work.12Procurement 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 rather than a form.13Issues 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 rather than merely complete.14Project 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.15Lessons learnedWhy lessons are captured continuously rather than at the end, the difference between a project register and an organisational repository, and what makes a lesson reusable instead of decorative.

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?

ARun the whole programme predictively, because the antenna carries most of the budget and a single approach keeps reporting consistent.
BRun the whole programme adaptively, since the organisation has adopted an agile operating model.
CDefer the decision until the requirements for all three components are stable enough to plan.
DChoose 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.

49 questions on this domain.

One per page, with a worked explanation.

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