PMP Exam Changes January 2021

As you may have already heard, the PMP or Project Management Professional exam is changing on January 2nd, 2021. These changes are going to be big, and in this video we are going to break down what those changes are and what you will need to know. But first, if you are looking to get your PMP certification in the next 6 weeks, be sure to sign up for a free class to learn how. Just go to examspm.com/certification. /free to sign up. Now let's go over an overview here. The last day to take the current version of the PMP exam is on December 31st, 2020. And now in this presentation, we're going to outline what those changes are and what you need to do. So first of all, you might be asking, well, why is the exam changing in the first place? Well, that's because industry is changing, the world is evolving, and the role of the project manager is changing as well. And The PMI, or Project Management Institute, need to keep up with these trends that's happening in the industry. And if there are some things that were previously not addressed in the PMP exam, they need to make sure that they reflect what is actually happening in industry in the PMP exam. And that's why they do the job task analysis to go out to different industries, to interview project managers, to have questionnaires sent out to them to see what they're actually doing on their jobs. And so they can change the PMP exam to accurately reflect what's actually happening in industry. And all the questions on the exam have been written and extensively reviewed by PMP certification holders and tracked by at least 2 academic references as well. So there's a high level of scrutiny that goes into the creation of this exam. So now let's talk about what is changing on the exam? Well, the new exam is going to be bigger, it's going to be harder. Well, why? Because they're adding in 50% more material into the exam. They're adding in Agile. So currently the PMP exam is mainly focused on predictive or waterfall methodologies, but with technology and the software industry blowing up, Agile is becoming a must because Agile is predominantly used in the software industry, and if PMP doesn't adjust or doesn't incorporate more of the Agile, they're going to be falling behind some of these industry trends that we are seeing. And the reason that the software industry and IT industry is moving towards Agile is because it allows them the flexibility to respond to changes much more quickly than the traditional predictive methodologies. And so PMI has to catch up with these trends, and therefore they're adding this into the PMP exam. So 50% of your exam after January 2nd on your exam will be based on agile project management methodologies. Now what is staying the same is that you still need your 35 contact hours of education in order to qualify for your exam, and also the PMBOK is not changing on January 2nd, so all of the material that you have studied up to now is still relevant because the PMBOK is not changing. All of the 49 processes are— the naming is staying the same, what they're doing is staying the same, the 5 process groups is staying the same, the 10 knowledge areas are staying the same, the terminologies are staying the same as well. If you're wondering about when the PMBOK 7 is coming out, that is probably going to be late 2021 or early 2022. Now in the old PMP exam, the one that we see now, the exam outline is divided by the 5 process groups that we see from the PMBOK 6th Edition. The 5 process groups are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing. But in the new exam, it's divided based on these 3 domains: people, process, and business environment. People is going to make up 42% of your exam, process is going to make up 50%, and business environment is going to make up 8%, and half of the exam is going to be based on agile or hybrid project management approaches as well. What is staying the same is that you're still going to get 200 questions on your exam. Now, 175 of these questions will be marked and 25 questions will not be marked. However, you will not know which of those 25 questions will not be marked, so you have to approach every single question as if it was marked. So now let's dive into this deeper. Within each domain, you will have a task and an enabler as well. Here is how the domain, the task, and the enabler are defined by the PMI. So the domain is defined as the high-level knowledge area that is essential for the practice of project management. The task is the underlying responsibility of the project manager within each of the domain areas. And finally, we have the enablers. This is an illustrative example of the work associated with the task. So you have to note that the enablers are not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather just offer a few examples that help demonstrate what task encompasses. So here is an example of the new task structure. You have the task statement. For example, the task statement is to manage conflict. And the enabler— so this is what's going to help you accomplish the objective of that task statement. And they could be, uh, in this example, our task is to manage conflict. So some examples of enablers could be interpreting the source and stage of the conflict, analyzing the context of the conflict, and evaluate, recommend, and reconcile the appropriate conflict resolution solution. So to recap again, we have 3 major domains. Inside of each of these domains, we're going to have different tasks which represent the actions that you can take within that domain to help you accomplish the objectives of that domain. And the enablers are the specific actions you can take to accomplish That task. So now let's take a look. Let's break down each of these three domains and take a look at each of the all of the tasks and enablers inside of them. The first one within people we already looked at. Task number one is to manage conflict. Task number two is to lead a team. Some enablers that will help you lead a team are setting clear vision and mission, support diversity and inclusion, value servant leadership, determining the appropriate leadership style, in. Inspire, motivate, and influence your team members and any other project stakeholders. Task number 3 is to support your team performance. So this includes things like supporting and recognizing the team members' growth and development, determining the appropriate feedback approach that you can take to give your team members feedback, and verifying their performance improvements. So again, some of these enablers are just suggestions of what you could do inside of each of these tasks. Task number 4 is to empower your team members and stakeholders, and some enablers that can help you do that include organizing around the team strength, support team task accountability, and evaluating, evaluate demonstration of task accountability. Task number 5 is to ensure team members and stakeholders are adequately trained. And to ensure that they're adequately trained, you have to determine the required competency for the job and what kind of training that they will need. You will allocate resources to training and measure the training outcomes. And finally, task number 6 is to build a team. Ways that you can build a team include appraise the stakeholder skills, deduce team resource requirements, and maintain team and knowledge transfer. For the sake of not boring anyone to death, for the remainder of these tasks, I'm not going to read out all of these enablers to you, but feel free to pause this video and read out what all of these enablers are. I'm just going to tell you what each of these tasks are and what they mean. So task number 7 is to address and remove any impediments, obstacles, and blockers for the team. So you as a project manager have to address anything that could prevent some of your team members from doing their job. Task number 8 is to negotiate project agreements. This is especially essential if you have vendors on your projects that's doing part of your project scope. You need to know what they're doing and to verify that they are doing that job and that they're getting paid for the work that they're doing. Task number 9 is to collaborate with your stakeholders. This is essentially very critical for Agile project manager because the stakeholder is much more involved in the creation of the project deliverable. In Waterfall, the stakeholders give you their requirement and they essentially say, see you later, and they see the deliverable at the end when you have everything ready. But this isn't the case with Agile project management. You're constantly giving updates and showcasing or demoing the working product that you have with them. So task number 9 is about how to collaborate with your stakeholders on your project. Task number 10 is to build shared understanding. So this is to ensure that if there is a misunderstanding between team members, you figure out what the root cause is, you address the underlying issues, and you come to a consensus as a group. Task number 11 is to engage and support virtual teams, especially since COVID-19. So many offices have been working towards remote team, and so PMI have included task number 11 to address some of these changes that have been happening in the industry. In terms of supporting remote teams, you need to understand the culture and dynamic. You need to know how and have processes in place to ensure that you know how your team is working even though you can't see them at all times during the working hours. Finally, task number 12 is to define the team ground rules. Ground rules are rules that everyone on the team knows about and has to follow. For example, you can't be more than 5 minutes late for a meeting or you're not going to get in. That's an example of a ground rule. Not only do you have to have these ground rules, you need someone to make sure that these are being implemented. As well. There are just 2 more tasks in the people section, and they are mentor-relevant stakeholders. So if you see someone in the organization who could benefit from the knowledge you have, then you can take the time to mentor them or give them mentoring opportunities so that they can rise in their career. And finally, task number 14 is to promote team performance through the application of emotional intelligence. So that's it for the first domain. So domain number 1 is People. This is going to be 42% of your exam after January, and there are 14 tasks in it. Now let's move on to domain number 2, which is Process. So this is the processes that you're going to use in your project, and there are a couple of tasks in here as well. Let's walk through them. This is the biggest section on your exam as well, comprising of 50% of the questions you will see, or in other words, 100 questions that you see on your exam. So let's go on to task number 1. Task number 1 is to execute the project with the urgency required to deliver business value. Task number 2 is to manage communications with your team, with your stakeholder, and make sure that your stakeholders are getting the communication at the frequency and channel and level of detail that they want it in. Task number 3 is to assess and manage risk on your project. This includes identifying the risk and prioritizing them and coming up with a response for the risk that are most likely to happen and most likely to cause a lot of damage on your project. Task number 4 is to engage your stakeholders. So the way that you can do this is to analyze the stakeholders based on the power and influence grid to figure out how much power they have and what kind of interest they may have on your project. And from there, you can categorize the stakeholders and come up with a strategy to engage each of the categories. Task number 5 includes planning and managing your budget and your resources. Coming up with a budget for your project is really essential. You can look at past lessons learned from other projects that have been done to give yourself an idea of how to do that. Planning and managing your resources is a key part of doing your job as a project manager. Task number 6 is to plan and manage your project schedule. And to do so, you may want to estimate each of the project tasks you may have, the milestones, dependencies, story points, etc., and then utilize historical data to figure out how long it will take to complete each of those tasks and sequence those tasks in the right order to produce the final project schedule. Task number 7 includes planning and managing quality on your product or deliverable. So to do that, you want to determine the quality standard for your project deliverable to begin with and then recommend options for improving that quality gap. And you want to continuously do this on your project, continuously monitoring the quality on your project and identifying new new standards so that you continuously improve your project deliverables qualities. Task number 8 is to plan and manage scope. So you can do this by determining and prioritizing your requirements that you get from your stakeholders, breaking down that scope into a WBS or a backlog, and monitoring and validating that scope. Task number 9 is to integrate project planning activities. Task number 10 is to manage project changes. Changes are going to happen on your project, so it's better to plan for a way to manage them rather than just hoping and praying that they won't happen in the first place, which is very unlikely, especially if you have a large project. So you need a strategy and a process in place to handle changes when they do arise. Task number 11 is to plan plan and manage procurement. Procurement is vendors that you may have on your project, so you need a plan on how to source these vendors, how to select them, and how to manage them throughout the project lifecycle and evaluate and give them feedback for their work. Task number 12 is to manage the project artifacts. Your project is going to produce a lot of paperwork, and you need a way, a central repository, to store all of this information as well. And Project information is going to change. Your project plan, your project schedule, your project budget, these are all living, breathing documents that's going to change throughout the course of your project. So you do also need a way to keep track of the latest versions that you get. Just because you get a new version of a budget doesn't mean that you just throw out the previous one because you may still want to look at it for reference, references. So this is why you need a system to keep track of the different versions of these documents. Documents that you have. Now, task number 13 is to determine the appropriate project methodology, method, and practice. Like I said earlier, Agile project management is going to be 50% of the exam, and hybrid methodologies as well. So on your project, you need to know the different types of methodologies that is accessible to you and pick the best one for your project. Situation, whether it's waterfall or predictive or hybrid or agile. Task number 13 is to establish project governance structures, and this includes determining the appropriate governance for the project, whether there is a PMO and what kind of power the PMO has, and ways to escalate problems that is beyond your control as a project manager. Task number 15 is to manage project issues. Issues are risks that actually happen. So a risk is an event that is uncertain, so it may or may not happen in the future. An issue is a risk that did come true, and you have to have ways to manage stuff that you weren't expecting that happens on your project. And this happens all the time. So when a risk does become an issue, you need a way to deal with them. If it is something that you have, you have predicted or have prepared for, you should have a risk response plan which you can implement to deal with these issues. And if it is an issue that is beyond your control, you need to escalate it to the appropriate stakeholder who will help you resolve it. Task number 16 is to ensure knowledge transfer of the project happens. So you have to discuss what the project responsibilities are in the team with respect to knowledge transfer and actually ensure that the process of the knowledge transfer does happen. Because the definition of a project is that it has a defined beginning and an end. So the project will end, the team will disband, and the knowledge they have gained on this project has to be passed on to the operations within this company so that it's not lost. So you need the process to do so, to ensure that the good work you have done on the project is being followed and implemented by the project. Another important reason why this knowledge transfer is really crucial is because let's say that this project is to update the software. 2 years later, the company wants to do another software update, but the team that did the original one have all moved on. The new team that comes in needs to have the proper documentation in place to take a look at what was done so that they know what is in the software update previously when they have to make the new update. If they have no idea what's going on, there's no documentation, they will be completely lost. Task number 17 is to plan and manage project or phase closures or transitions. Like what I just said earlier, the definition of project is that it has a defined beginning and end and creates a unique product, service, or result. So by its definition, a project has to come to an end, and when it does, you have to have the procedures in place to determine the success of that project and to conclude the project. The project doesn't just end when the deliverable is finished. There is a plan in place to document the lessons learned, to close out the project, to pay all the bills, and to release all of the resources. And finally, the last domain within the new exam guidelines is domain number 3, Business Environment. This is 8% of your exam. So task number 1 within, within Business Environment is to plan and manage project compliance. This is to ensure that your project is following all of the guidelines internally within your organization as well as externally, so you're following all of the local laws that you have to comply with. Task number 2 is to evaluate and deliver project benefits and value. Task number 3 is to evaluate and address external business environment changes for impact on scope. And finally, task number 4 is to support organizational Change. I hope you enjoyed this video. This video gave you an overview of what's coming up on January 2nd, 2021 for the PMP exam. And now if you are looking to get your PMP certification, be sure to check out our free course at examspm.com/free. I can't wait to see you there. Thank you so much for joining me today.