I like to use the analogy of a house under construction to go about explaining the structure of the PMBOK and how we can approach the learning process much as we would the building of a house.

Chimp’s Story of a House

I remember the spring of 2001 very well. I just put down a big chunk of my life savings into the down payment of a house. It was in the countryside, pristine wilderness and meadows much much alien to the city ‘chimp’ who had grown up in a concrete jungle.

There’s something about being a first-time homeowner that is special. I recall driving hours every weekend to see the construction of the house. At first, it look very much like the picture below:

I would walk through the structure (I probably wasn’t supposed to.) and try to imagine where all of the rooms were. The flooring wasn’t completed yet and the insulation hadn’t been put into the walls yet. I remember walking from the living room to the kitchen and I could almost figure out what the house would look like, but I had to fill in the details on my own, in my mind.

The previous parts of this Prep Guide up to this point can be thought of like the skeletal structure of a house that is in the early stages of construction. As you walk up to this structure, you can make out that the building has two floors, you can see where the door is going to be and how the various rooms of the house are laid out. The frame work and all the process diagrams therein contained function like the skeleton frame of the house. You get to see all the components of a project that you as the Project Manager should be looking out for and actively managing, just like you see where the various rooms are going to be laid out in the house.

Following our analogies, we will spend a good part of the rest of this guide covering the Knowledge Areas, which can be thought of as the actual ‘stuff’ in the house, or the building materials that you would use to fill in the gaps in the walls, the flooring and the roof. It’s the details that go in to the house, the insulation and dry walls that you erect and the floors that you lay and the plumbing and wiring that goes into these components of the house. The Project Management Knowledge Areas perform precisely this function, as they help to give additional details to how the various elements of a project can be run.

In the subsequent parts of this guide, we will be covering each of the Nine Project Management Knowledge Areas in the following sequence:

• Project Integration Management
• Project Scope Management
• Project Time Management
• Project Cost Management
• Project Quality Management
• Project Human Resources Management
• Project Communications Management
• Project Risk Management
• Project Procurement Management

Under Each Section, we will cover the relevant project management processes and important concepts that you will need to know going into the PMP Examination.

I hope that you’ve liked reading this guide so far! Please leave your comments and requests, they mean a lot to me!

Ook, Road Chimp Signing out!