Style of the Book

This book will include questions in the body of text. This is done to reinforce specific pieces of information that are important for the examination. Many of the questions come right after the discussion of the topic, as you have already seen in this chapter. This will help you focus on the information and also will give you an idea of the way in which the questions are found in the examination. There are also questions that are part of the teaching process, so you should pay careful attention to any and all questions found in this book.

The two models of project management in the PMBOK are the Phase model and the Knowledge Area model. Both are used and discussed in this book. There are overlaps between the two, and the redundancy in information is intended. Certainly you should know that if a topic is explained in both the phase and knowledge areas of the book that the topic is important and will be examined on the test.

There may be several discussions throughout the book of a single topic. This is done to offer different ways of understanding the topic to the reader. One of the explanations may be easier to comprehend than another. The reader can choose the explanation that makes the most sense to him or her, although all explanations are intended to help the reader get a grasp of the basic information.

At the end of each chapter, there will be a list of questions that have been used throughout the text of the chapter. This time, the answers will be separate so that you can use each chapter as a test on the materials. The answers and explanations of the answers if necessary will also be found at the end of the chapter.

There will be a mid-book test of one hundred and nine questions. This is done after the phases are taught. Use this mid-book exam to see how you are doing up to that point. You will get a good feel about your progress from how you are scoring on the mid-book exam. You should take no more than one and a half minutes as an average for each question. Because you will have already seen most of the questions in the mid-book exam, you should not need too long to get the correct answer. The questions in the mid-book exam are mixed, whereas the questions at the end of other chapters are focused specifically on the chapter that precedes them.

This first chapter gives you basic ideas about how to pass the examination and some basic terms. The following chapters will be on specific project management techniques and practices that you can use in you professional life as well as when preparing for the PMP certification examination.