PMI Certified Associate in Project Management

Every team shares a vocabulary. You learn the terms and tools that appear in any project, how information flows, and how a team keeps records of its decisions, risks and changes.

• Core terms: scope, schedule, cost, quality and risk
• Project documents and their purposes
• Meetings and communication basics
• Tools: charts, logs and registers
• Governance and project offices
• Ethics and professional conduct

You build A glossary and a document map for a small project.

A project begins by agreeing why it exists. You study business cases, project charters, stakeholder identification and the first decisions that set direction.

• Business case and project selection
• The project charter
• Identifying stakeholders
• Defining success criteria
• Assumptions and constraints
• Kickoff and early planning

You build A charter and stakeholder list for a small project.

Predictive projects define scope, schedule and cost up front. You learn how to break work down, estimate it, sequence activities, and build the plan that later control compares against.

• Requirements and scope definition
• Work breakdown structures
• Estimating durations and effort
• Sequencing, dependencies and the critical path
• Cost estimates and a budget
• Baselines

You build A work breakdown structure, schedule and budget for a small project.

The rest of a plan covers who does the work, how well, how informed everyone is, and what could go wrong. You see how each supporting plan holds up the main plan.

• Quality planning and measures
• Resource planning and team roles
• Communication planning
• Identifying and rating risks
• Planning risk responses
• Buying goods and services and contract basics

You build A risk register and a communications plan for the same small project.

Plans change on contact with reality. You track progress against the baseline, use basic earned value ideas, manage change requests, and close a project or phase properly.

• Monitoring progress and reporting status
• Basic earned value: planned, earned and actual
• Change control and approvals
• Managing issues and risks in flight
• Quality control and acceptance
• Closing a project and recording lessons

You build A status report with earned value figures and a change request log.

Agile teams deliver in short cycles and adapt as they learn. You study the values and principles behind agile, and meet Scrum, Kanban and extreme programming at the level of how each one works.

• The agile values and principles
• Iterative and incremental delivery
• Scrum: roles, events and artifacts
• Kanban and the flow of work
• Extreme programming practices
• Choosing between agile and plan-based approaches

You build A comparison of how one piece of work would run under Scrum and under Kanban.

Agile work is planned in layers, from vision down to the day’s tasks. You write user stories, order a backlog, estimate relative size, plan an iteration, and learn from reviews and retrospectives.

• User stories and acceptance criteria
• Product backlog and ordering
• Relative estimation and velocity
• Iteration planning and the daily meeting
• Reviews and retrospectives
• Burn charts and tracking progress

You build A product backlog of user stories and a plan for the first iteration.

Projects exist to meet a need, and business analysis keeps them pointed at it. You learn how needs are found, requirements gathered and checked, and solutions tested against the original problem.

• Business needs and the problem to solve
• Stakeholder needs and elicitation methods
• Requirement types and documentation
• Prioritizing requirements
• Traceability from need to result
• Evaluating whether the solution delivered value

You build A needs statement and a traceable requirements list for a small project.

You apply the whole course to one small project. You write the case, choose plan-based or agile methods, build the plan, and show how you would track and close it.

• Defining the need and the project
• Choosing an approach and giving reasons
• Building the plan or backlog
• Planning for risk and communication
• Presenting how it will be tracked and closed

You build A full project plan, with a short note on why the chosen approach fits.