Chapter 3. Examine Project Planning

This chapter covers the following PMP exam topics: Planning Process Group—3.4 Develop the Project Management Plan—4.2 Collect Requirements—5.1 Define Scope—5.2 Create Work Breakdown Structure—5.3 Define Activities—6.1 Sequence Activities—6.2 Estimate Activity Resources—6.3 Estimate Activity Durations—6.4 Develop Schedule—6.5 Estimate Costs—7.1 Determine Budget—7.2 (For more information on the PMP exam topics, see “About the PMP Exam” in the introduction.)

In Chapter 1, “Project Management Framework Fundamentals,” we introduced the PMI concepts of processes, process groups, and knowledge areas. Recall that PMI defines a total of 42 project processes that describe activities throughout a project’s life cycle. These processes are organized into nine knowledge areas and represent five process groups. One of the most prominent of the process groups is project planning. Nearly half of the processes occur in this group; 20 of the 42 processes are in this group. In case you might think that planning processes are localized to a particular area of your project, note that processes in the planning group span all nine knowledge areas. Let’s look at project planning in more detail.