Project

Like any project, the PMP examination required that some sort of scope be set. The document which set the scope for the project is the Project Management Profession Examination Specification. I covered this in Part 12 if you need the full reference or want to know how to obtain it. In most cases the thing which is being produced has at least a passable resemblence to what was specified. In this case, one which is supposed to be exemplary of project management, it is reasonable to expect that the results were pretty close to what was asked for. Therefore, knowing the blueprint of the PMP examination is very helpful in navigating your way through it. With that out of the way I'm just going to dive in and start stating the most important parts of the spec.

What the test consists of: The PMP exam consists of questions from six different areas in differing percentages. For the current exam they are:

• Initiation, 11 percent
• Planning, 23 percent
• Executing, 27 percent
• Monitoring and Controlling, 21 percent
• Closing, 9 percent
• Professional and Social Responsibility, 9 percent

These percentages should guide your study. The high weighting given to Planning and Executing for example mean that you can not neglect these areas. You should focus on them for at least half of your time - unless you are already quite familiar with them, It also means that if you feel weak in one of the lesser areas, you should not fall into panic. In fact, you could miss all the questions on Professional and Social Responsibility and still pass the exam.

The PMP examination specification goes further than this though. Each of these "Performance Domains" are broken down further into a number of tasks. For example, Initiating is broken down into project selection, scope definition, development and documentation of risks, assumptions and constraints, stakeholder requirements analysis, development of project charter, and obtaining approvals. Each of these tasks requires a certain knowledge and the application of a set of defined skills. An example of knowledge required for risk documentation would be knowing what risk identification tools and techniques are available and suitable for the project. An example of a skill required would be "identifying risk".

With these examples you can see how the spec has moved from being ... um ... non-exisitent? to being based on the performance of project management, or at least tying the performance of Project Management to the knowledge and processes defined (as mentioned previously, the PMBOK has morphed from being a taxonomy to a prescriptive document) in the PMBOK Guide.

What effect this has on preparing for the exam and passing the exam I am not quite sure, but I'm starting to think that moving from the old braindump of process areas towards a new braindump of "Performance Domains" and their tasks would be a good idea. That will be a topic for upcoming articles.