A free, open study guide for the Project Management Professional (PMP) (PMP) exam: revision notes for every domain, side-by-side comparisons of commonly confused services, a glossary, 20 worked sample questions, and the official syllabus as a checklist with a full free lesson for every topic.
Maintained by SaveMyCert, where you can read every lesson free, practice with explained questions and take timed mock exams.
- Exam at a glance
- Exam domains
- What is in this repo
- Syllabus checklist
- How to study for PMP
- Sample questions
- Free resources
| Exam code | PMP |
| Level | Professional |
| Questions | 180 (170 scored) |
| Time limit | 240 min |
| Passing score | Pass / fail |
| Format | Multiple choice, multiple response, matching & case scenarios |
| Exam fee | |
| Valid for | 3 years (60 PDUs) |
Exam details change. Always confirm them in the official PMI PMP Examination Content Outline (July 2026) from Project Management Institute.
| # | Domain | Weight | Topics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | People | 33% | 8 |
| 2 | Process | 41% | 10 |
| 3 | Business Environment | 26% | 8 |
That is 3 domains and 26 topics. Spend your time in proportion to the weights: the heaviest domain decides more of your score than the lightest.
| File | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Domain 1 notes | People: condensed revision notes per topic |
| Domain 2 notes | Process: condensed revision notes per topic |
| Domain 3 notes | Business Environment: condensed revision notes per topic |
| Commonly confused services | Side-by-side tables of the services questions set against each other |
| Glossary | Every in-scope term and service in one sentence |
| Sample questions | 20 worked questions with answers and reasoning |
| Exam-day guide | Booking, testing options, scoring, results and retakes |
Tick each topic off once you can explain it without notes. The "Must know" facts are the ones questions turn on. Each lesson link goes to the complete, free lesson.
Weight: 33%. Leading and engaging people: a shared vision, conflict, team leadership, stakeholder engagement and expectations, knowledge transfer and communication. Official weighting 33%.
📝 Revision notes: Domain 1: People
- Develop a common vision
Enablers: Help ensure a shared vision with key stakeholders; Promote the shared vision; Keep the vision current; Break down situations to identify the root cause of a misunderstanding of the vision.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Develop a Common Vision: Shared Vision, Ownership and Root Cause
- Must know: The vision is the why; scope is the what. Every trade-off is tested against the intended outcome, on predictive and agile projects alike.
- Must know: The charter formally records purpose, measurable objectives and success criteria and authorizes the project; a product vision statement, product box and roadmap carry the vision on agile work.
- Manage conflicts
Enablers: Identify conflict sources; Analyze the context for the conflict; Implement an agreed-on resolution strategy; Communicate conflict management principles with the team and external stakeholders; Establish an environment that fosters adherence to common ground rules; Manage and rectify ground rule violations.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Conflict Management: Techniques, Levels and Ground Rules
- Must know: Find the cause before choosing a response: personality clashes often hide resource, priority or role conflicts.
- Must know: Context decides the technique: importance, urgency, relationships, authority and culture.
- Lead the project team
Enablers: Establish expectations at the team level; Empower the team; Solve problems; Represent the voice of the team; Support the team's varied experiences, skills, and perspectives; Determine an appropriate leadership style; Establish clear roles and responsibilities within the team.- 📖 Lesson: Leading the Project Team for the PMP: Leadership Styles, Empowerment and Team Roles
- Must know: The team writes its own charter or working agreement; the project manager facilitates it and revisits it with the team whenever members, locations or work change.
- Must know: When someone misses a team expectation: talk privately to understand the cause, clarify, agree a specific improvement plan, and escalate only if that fails.
- Engage stakeholders
Enablers: Identify stakeholders; Analyze stakeholders; Analyze and tailor communication to stakeholder needs; Execute the stakeholder engagement plan; Optimize alignment among stakeholder needs, expectations, and project objectives; Build trust and influence stakeholders to accomplish project objectives.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Stakeholder Engagement: Identify, Analyze, Engage and Build Trust
- Must know: Stakeholder engagement is a loop: identify, analyze, plan, execute, then reassess whenever something changes.
- Must know: Identify stakeholders as soon as the charter exists, using many sources (existing stakeholders, lessons learned, experts), and keep identifying them all project long.
- Align stakeholder expectations
Enablers: Categorize stakeholders; Identify stakeholder expectations; Facilitate discussions to align expectations; Organize and act on mentoring opportunities.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Align Stakeholder Expectations: Categorize, Facilitate and Mentor
- Must know: Power/interest grid: manage closely (high/high), keep satisfied (high power, low interest), keep informed (low power, high interest), monitor (low/low).
- Must know: Salience model: power, legitimacy and urgency; all three make a definitive stakeholder, legitimacy plus urgency without power make a dependent one.
- Manage stakeholder expectations
Enablers: Identify internal and external customer expectations; Align and maintain outcomes to internal and external customer expectations; Monitor internal and external customer satisfaction/expectations and respond as needed.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Manage Stakeholder Expectations: Customer Expectations, Alignment and Satisfaction
- Must know: External customers are outside the organization and receive or use the outcome; internal customers operate, support or work with it inside the organization, and their readiness expectations are part of success.
- Must know: Gather expectations from the real customers and users (interviews plus observation) before requirements are written, reaching them through any contractually agreed contact.
- Help ensure knowledge transfer
Enablers: Identify knowledge critical to the project; Gather knowledge; Foster an environment for knowledge transfer.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Knowledge Transfer: Identify, Gather and Share Critical Knowledge
- Must know: Knowledge transfer has three enablers: identify critical knowledge, gather it, and foster an environment where people share it.
- Must know: Explicit knowledge goes into repositories and documents; tacit knowledge moves through shadowing, pairing, coaching and joint work, not manuals or courses.
- Plan and manage communication
Enablers: Define a communication strategy; Promote transparency and collaboration; Establish a feedback loop; Understand reporting requirements; Create reports aligned with sponsors and stakeholder expectations; Support reporting and governance processes.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Communication Management: Plan, Channels, Reports and Governance
- Must know: Analyze each stakeholder group's information needs first; tools, templates and meetings come after.
- Must know: Communication channels = n(n − 1) ÷ 2, counting the project manager; for a change in team size, subtract the two totals.
Weight: 41%. Delivering the work: integrated planning and delivery approach, scope, value-based delivery, resources, procurement, finance, quality, schedule, status and closure. Official weighting 41%.
📝 Revision notes: Domain 2: Process
- Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery
Enablers: Assess project needs, complexity, and magnitude; Recommend a project management development approach (i.e., predictive, adaptive/agile, or hybrid management); Determine critical information requirements (e.g., sustainability); Recommend a project execution strategy; Create an integrated project management plan; Estimate work effort and resource requirements; Assess consolidated project plans for dependencies, gaps, and continued business value; Maintain the integrated project management plan; Collect and analyze data to make informed project decisions.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Integrated Project Management Plan: Approach, Estimating and Plan Delivery
- Must know: Magnitude is size; complexity is uncertainty. Requirements and technical uncertainty, not budget or headcount, drive the delivery approach.
- Must know: Predictive = fixed requirements, single delivery; iterative = evolving requirements, single delivery; incremental = known, stable-enough requirements, frequent delivery; agile = both evolving and frequent.
- Develop and manage project scope
Enablers: Define scope; Obtain stakeholder agreement on project scope; Break down scope.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Scope Management: Requirements, Scope Statement, WBS and Backlog
- Must know: Pick the elicitation technique by the problem: can't describe the work, observe; can't specify the product, prototype; groups conflict under a deadline, run a facilitated workshop.
- Must know: The scope statement holds the product scope description, deliverables, acceptance criteria and exclusions; the charter authorizes and the scope management plan describes the method.
- Help ensure value-based delivery
Enablers: Identify value components with key stakeholders; Prioritize work based on value and stakeholder feedback; Assess opportunities to deliver value incrementally; Examine the business value throughout the project; Verify a measurement system is in place to track benefits; Evaluate delivery options to demonstrate value.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Value-Based Delivery: Prioritization, Incremental Value and Benefits
- Must know: Value is defined with the stakeholders who hold it, in measurable outcomes, before work is prioritized; reconcile competing definitions with them and the sponsor before escalating.
- Must know: Intangible value such as trust or morale stays in the business case and is tracked through an agreed indirect measure with a baseline and target.
- Plan and manage resources
Enablers: Define and plan resources based on requirements; Manage and optimize resource needs and availability.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Resource Management: Planning, Acquiring and Optimizing Project Resources
- Must know: The resource management plan covers how team and physical resources are identified, acquired, developed, managed, recognized and released.
- Must know: Resource needs are derived from requirements; when requirements change, update the resource plan and start acquisition ahead of the lead time.
- Plan and manage procurement
Enablers: Plan procurement; Execute a procurement management plan; Select preferred contract types; Evaluate vendor performance; Verify objectives of the procurement agreement are met; Participate in agreement negotiations; Determine a negotiation strategy; Manage suppliers and contracts; Plan and manage the procurement strategy; Develop a delivery solution.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Procurement Management: Contract Types, Negotiation and Vendor Management
- Must know: Make-or-buy comes before any bid document and counts opportunity cost and non-cost factors, not just the price.
- Must know: RFQ for fully specified items compared on price; RFP when sellers must propose an approach; RFI to learn the market.
- Plan and manage finance
Enablers: Analyze project financial needs; Quantify risk and contingency financial allocations; Plan spend tracking throughout the project life cycle; Plan financial reporting; Anticipate future finance challenges; Monitor financial variations and work with the governance process; Manage financial reserves.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Cost and Finance Management: Budget, Reserves and Earned Value
- Must know: Analogous scales a past project's total, parametric multiplies a reliable unit rate by a quantity, and bottom-up rolls up work packages for the most accuracy.
- Must know: Cost baseline = work package estimates + contingency reserve, and it equals BAC; project budget = cost baseline + management reserve.
- Plan and optimize quality of products/deliverables
Enablers: Gather quality requirements for project deliverables; Plan quality processes and tools; Execute a quality management plan; Help ensure regulatory compliance; Manage cost of quality (CoQ) and sustainability; Conduct ongoing quality reviews; Implement continuous improvement.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Quality Management: Cost of Quality, Quality Tools and Continuous Improvement
- Must know: Quality is meeting requirements; grade is the feature level. Low grade can be acceptable, low quality never is, and lowering grade is how to cut cost without cutting quality.
- Must know: Gather quality requirements during planning, from every user group, regulations and standards, not only from functional acceptance criteria.
- Plan and manage schedule
Enablers: Prepare a schedule based on the selected development approach; Coordinate with other projects and operations; Estimate project tasks (milestones, dependencies, story points); Utilize benchmarks and historical data; Create a project schedule; Baseline a project schedule; Execute a schedule management plan; Analyze schedule variation.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Schedule Management: Critical Path, Float, Baselines and Agile Forecasting
- Must know: Detail follows certainty: network and critical path for stable, interdependent work; iterations or flow for changing work; milestones plus cadence for hybrid.
- Must know: Iterations are fixed timeboxes: unfinished items go back to the product backlog rather than extending the iteration.
- Evaluate project status
Enablers: Develop project metrics, analysis, and reconciliation; Identify and tailor needed artifacts; Help ensure artifacts are created, reviewed, updated, and documented; Help ensure accessibility of artifacts; Assess current progress; Measure, analyze, and update project metrics; Communicate project status; Continually assess the effectiveness of artifact management.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Project Status: Metrics, Earned Value, Burn Charts and Status Reporting
- Must know: Outcome metrics show whether the project delivers value; output metrics only show activity. Add leading indicators when stakeholders need early warning.
- Must know: Velocity is a single team's planning measure: count only accepted work, never turn it into a quota and never use it to rank teams.
- Manage project closure
Enablers: Obtain project stakeholder approval of project completion; Determine criteria to successfully close the project or phase; Validate readiness for transition (e.g., to operations team or next phase); Conclude activities to close the project or phase (e.g., final lessons learned, retrospectives, procurement, financials, resources).- 📖 Lesson: PMP Project Closure: Completion Criteria, Transition, Lessons Learned and Closing Contracts
- Must know: Closure criteria are measurable, agreed during planning by the sponsor, customer and receiving owner, and limited to conditions the project can meet before it ends; long-term benefits are tracked after closure.
- Must know: When a stakeholder disputes completion, review the agreed criteria and the evidence with them; new expectations raised at closure are changes or follow-on work.
Weight: 26%. Connecting the project to the organization: governance, compliance, change control, impediments and issues, risk, continuous improvement, organizational change and the external environment. Official weighting 26%.
📝 Revision notes: Domain 3: Business Environment
- Define and establish project governance
Enablers: Describe and establish the structure, rules, procedures, reporting, ethics, and policies through the use of organizational process assets (OPAs); Define success metrics; Outline governance escalation paths and thresholds.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Project Governance: Decision Rights, Escalation Thresholds and Success Metrics
- Must know: Governance decides who decides, who oversees and what the project manager may decide alone; project management plans and delivers within it.
- Must know: Start from the organization's process assets (policies, templates, procedures, lessons learned) and tailor them; culture and regulations are environmental factors, not OPAs.
- Plan and manage project compliance
Enablers: Confirm project compliance requirements (e.g., security, health and safety, sustainability, regulatory compliance); Classify compliance categories; Determine potential threats to compliance; Use methods to support compliance; Analyze the consequences of noncompliance; Determine the necessary approach and action(s) to address compliance needs; Measure the extent to which the project is in compliance.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Project Compliance Management: Requirements, Threats, Evidence and Noncompliance
- Must know: Confirm compliance requirements early with qualified legal, compliance, safety or privacy experts; earlier lists, the sponsor's view or the team's own research are inputs, not confirmation.
- Must know: Re-confirm obligations whenever scope adds a new jurisdiction, site or type of data, before the change is finalized.
- Manage and control changes
Enablers: Execute the change control process; Communicate the status of proposed changes; Implement approved changes to the project; Update project documentation to reflect changes.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Integrated Change Control: Change Requests, CCB, Agile Change and Configuration Management
- Must know: Every proposed change to approved scope, schedule, cost or design becomes a documented change request in the change log, whoever asks and however.
- Must know: Analyse first: no change reaches a decision-maker without an integrated impact analysis covering every affected stream and the risks of any recovery tactic.
- Remove impediments and manage issues
Enablers: Evaluate the impact of impediments; Prioritize and highlight impediments; Determine and apply an intervention strategy to remove/minimize impediments; Reassess continually to help ensure impediments, obstacles, and blockers for the team are being addressed; Recognize when a risk becomes an issue; Collaborate with relevant stakeholders on an approach to resolve the issues.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Impediments and Issues: Remove Blockers, Escalate and Resolve
- Must know: Evaluate first: find out what an impediment blocks, for how long and whether float absorbs it before choosing a response.
- Must know: A delay beyond an activity's float can create a new critical path; parallel path delays do not add up, the milestone moves by the largest net delay.
- Plan and manage risk
Enablers: Identify risks; Analyze risks; Monitor and control risks; Develop a risk management plan; Maintain a risk register (e.g., poor IT security); Execute a risk management plan (e.g., risk response for security and managing sustainability risks); Communicate the status of a risk impact on the project.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Risk Management: Plan, Register, Analysis and Responses
- Must know: The risk management plan sets the approach (methodology, roles, funding, timing, categories, scales, thresholds, reporting); the register holds each risk with its owner, trigger, response and status.
- Must know: Thresholds decide which risks need active responses: a zero-tolerance rule overrides a low matrix score, and a missed confidence target calls for responses to overall project risk.
- Continuous improvement
Enablers: Utilize lessons learned; Help ensure continuous improvement processes are updated; Update organizational process assets (OPAs).- 📖 Lesson: PMP Continuous Improvement: Lessons Learned, Process Updates and Organizational Process Assets
- Must know: OPAs (templates, checklists, procedures, policies, lessons repositories, historical data) are the organization's own assets and can be updated by their owners; EEFs (culture, regulation, markets, infrastructure, purchased databases) are conditions the project responds to.
- Must know: Review lessons and historical data from similar work before plans are baselined, and let evidence override an unsupported estimate.
- Support organizational change
Enablers: Assess organizational culture; Evaluate the impact of organizational change on the project and determine required actions.- 📖 Lesson: PMP Organizational Change: Assessing Culture and Responding to Change
- Must know: Assess culture by watching and asking how decisions really happen; when surveys and behavior disagree, believe the behavior.
- Must know: A pattern repeated in past projects' lessons learned is culture to plan around, not bad luck.
- Evaluate external business environment changes
Enablers: Survey changes to the external business environment (e.g., regulations, technology, geopolitical, market); Assess and prioritize the impact on project scope/backlog based on changes in the external business environment; Continually review the external business environment for impacts on project scope/backlog.- 📖 Lesson: PMP External Business Environment: Surveying and Assessing Outside Changes
- Must know: External changes come from outside the organization (laws, technology, geopolitics, markets); reorganizations, staffing and internal process changes are internal and handled by other tasks.
- Must know: Survey outward with a structured scan such as PESTLE, fed by the experts who watch each area; classify by the kind of thing that changed (a change in preferences is Social whatever its subject).
- Read the lesson for each topic in the checklist above, starting with the heaviest domain. Every lesson is free on the PMP revision notes.
- Practice straight after reading. Answer PMP practice questions on the topic you just read. Each option comes with an explanation of why it is right or wrong.
- Review what you got wrong, re-read that lesson section, and tick the topic off only when you get its questions right.
- Take a full-length PMP mock exam under the real time limit. Aim to pass mocks comfortably before you book.
- On the last day, skim the PMP cheat sheet instead of starting anything new.
sample-questions.md has 20 worked PMP questions with the answer, why each option is right or wrong, and the reasoning steps.
- PMI PMP Examination Content Outline (July 2026): the official source (Project Management Institute)
- PMP certification overview
- PMP revision notes: every lesson, free to read
- PMP practice questions: with an explanation on every option
- PMP mock exams: full-length and timed
- PMP cheat sheet: the key facts on one page
- All certification study guides
Spotted an error or an out-of-date fact? Open an issue with the topic and a link to the official source. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
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This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Project Management Institute. Project Management Professional (PMP) and PMP are trademarks of their respective owner. Exam domains and weights are taken from the official exam guide linked above.