CompTIA Project+ PK0-005

Hours: 50 / Access Length: 12 Months / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

This course can benefit you in two ways. If you intend to pass the CompTIA Project+ (Exam PK0-005) certification examination, this course can be a significant part of your preparation. But certification is not the only key to professional success in the field of project management. Today's job market demands individuals with demonstrable skills, and the information and activities in this course can help you build your IT project management skill set so that you can confidently perform your duties in any junior-level IT project manager role.

On course completion, you will be able to achieve the following:

• Manage the project life cycle.
• Coordinate small- to medium-sized projects.
• Establish a communication plan and manage resources and stakeholders.
• Maintain project documentation and artifacts.
• Support the completion of larger projects within an information technology (IT) environment.

This course prepares a student to take the CompTIA Project+ PK0-005 national certification exam.

This course includes access to the official CompTIA course content, official CompTIA hands-on live lab cloud content,

and official CompTIA practice certification exam.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Preparing for the Project

Organizational factors influence project management and the project manager (PM) role. Before a project starts, business cases explore business problems and potential solutions. The business case sets the tone and expectations for a project. In addition, companies leverage different organizational structures and various job titles to accomplish their unique goals. Understanding the organizational environment can help you lead projects successfully.

Lesson 2: Selecting the Project Framework

Thanks to the diversity of organization and industry types, many project management methodologies and frameworks exist today. Even a single project might use multiple frameworks. Though each framework has strengths and weaknesses, they all solve specific problems and work well in certain scenarios. The proper framework can simplify the project management process and amplify the project’s results. As a PM, you want to understand your project management options and select the right fit for each project. This lesson will compare methodologies and discuss the criteria for choosing a project framework.

Lesson 3: Initiating the Project

A project moves through four broad phases: initiation, planning, execution, and closing. The initiation phase officially kicks off the project. In this phase, the PM builds the project team and organizes the stakeholders. The PM also sets documentation standards, which will affect activities for the entire life cycle of the project. They also create vital documents to clarify the project’s purpose, scope, and timeline. Finally, the PM holds a kickoff to start the work officially.

Lesson 4: Facilitating Effective Meetings

Communication constantly happens throughout a project, yet miscommunication is a common reason for project failure. Excessive contact means people share plenty of information. However, it doesn’t mean the right people receive the information they need. This lesson will teach you how to facilitate effective communications, including using various tools, techniques, and strategies to improve your messages and simplify your work.

Lesson 5: Implementing Solution Design

In a perfect world, project teams could implement a single product that makes every stakeholder happy. In reality, no single software will fulfill every requirement perfectly. Teams must consider the tradeoffs of various features and assemble a workable product suite. Furthermore, as enterprise environments expand, new additions to the environment need to be compatible with all the other existing products. Finding a good solution and the right fit requires thoughtful analysis and considerable business acumen and technical expertise. The solution design process helps teams work through the design process.

Lesson 6: Managing Resources

Every project needs money, people, and materials to function, and these are the project resources. Resource management runs from the planning phase through the end of the closing phase of the project. The PM spends most of their time managing these resources.

The PM identifies what the project will need and obtains the necessary resources. They also allocate the resources to various tasks and track progress. Additionally, they are responsible for ensuring resources are fit for the work and productive. PMs also contribute to the professional development of team members. This topic will review resource types, sourcing methods, and the resource management process. You will also learn about tools and techniques to help you analyze resource usage.

Lesson 7: Managing Risk

No project is guaranteed to proceed as planned; every project faces risks. Risks are the potential future events that could change a project—for better or worse. Risk management is about preparation, where the team thinks about what they would do if the risk happened. This activity helps them improve system weaknesses and create backup plans. As a result, the project is more likely to withstand the unexpected. This increased resiliency helps the project and the project team avoid surprises—or at least react quickly when they happen.

Lesson 8: Creating a Project Schedule

A whole project seems daunting when estimating costs, identifying resources, and planning a sequence. For instance, imagine you are leading a project to build a house. It has one primary deliverable: a newly constructed house. It would be challenging to estimate the entire project as one deliverable accurately. You need to know how many workers you need in each discipline, which equipment to rent and when, and how long everything will take. You also need to know how much material to order and how much everything should cost. A whole house simply has too many variables to consider all at once.

Still, we need estimates to plan a project. If you could identify all the parts that go into building a house, estimating becomes easier. Perhaps estimating a whole house isn't practical. However, you could reasonably estimate how much flooring and supplies you need and how many people you need to install it. Homes need electrical, too. Perhaps you don't know much about electricity, but you don't have to know everything as a PM. Instead, you can consult with an electrician to obtain estimates on supplies and labor. After repeating this process for every section of the construction project, all the small estimates will eventually create a plan for the entire project. This lesson will walk through the process of turning project deliverables into a project schedule.

Lesson 9: Creating a Project Plan

The project management process involves many measurements. PMs need to build plans to measure progress and systems for tracking data. The goal of gathering metrics is to improve an outcome, so they also create plans that will help ensure the project delivers as expected.

This lesson reviews how to create baseline metrics. It also reviews how to improve project results with schedule analysis and proactive quality plans. Finally, this lesson will summarize all the planning phase work into a project management plan.

Lesson 10: Procuring Solutions

Organizations rarely have every resource you need to complete a project. It’s impractical for an organization to house all the talent, build every software, and build every piece of equipment it needs to conduct business. As a result, everybody needs to procure resources from a third party. The procurement process is the method that organizations use to secure goods and services from other companies. This lesson will introduce you to the terms and artifacts with which PMs interact most.

Lesson 11: Managing Project Execution

This lesson begins execution phase activities in earnest. In the discovery, initiation, and planning phases, the PM leads the team and drives most of the activity. All of that work prepares the team for the execution phase, where they implement the plan and create deliverables. This phase creates the work that people can see. The previous and subsequent phases are invaluable and integral to the project’s success. However, the execution phase is when stakeholders start to see changes to their systems. This phase is when the project becomes a reality for many people and is going to garner more attention from people outside the team. As a result, it’s more important than ever to keep the team focused and productive. In this lesson, you will learn about foundational tools that help keep the team engaged and stakeholders satisfied. This lesson covers the team’s tools to document their progress and simplify their processes. It also reviews the PM’s methods for monitoring scope progress and sharing information with teams and stakeholders. Finally, it reviews methods you and the team use to manage the pace of work.

Lesson 12: Managing Issues and Changes

A solid project plans for the unexpected and adapts when they occur. PMs oversee the management processes for two types of deviations: changes and issues. Changes and issues are either positive or negative events. They usually create deviations in the project’s scope, cost, or schedule, so you must monitor them and control their impact as much as possible. Of course, some events are unavoidable, but structured issue management and change control processes allow you to optimize the impact to some degree. At the very least, these management processes help you monitor issues and changes so that you can react accordingly. This lesson will review how PMs use escalation, communication, and organization to manage project issues and changes. You will also learn why issues and changes can positively impact your project.

Lesson 13: Managing Performance

Nearly every activity in the project execution phase can potentially change the project’s scope, budget, and schedule. For instance, project changes can create new activities and increase the scope and budget. Realized risks will change the budget and could disrupt the schedule. Even when everything runs smoothly, the schedule can slowly drift away from the plan as activities finish a little early or late.

The project’s cost and schedule are not fixed; without oversight, they will stray from the plan. It takes surprisingly little time for a project to run out of budget if nobody monitors costs. Therefore, the PM must continually manage the project’s performance and adjust the plan. This effort keeps the project plan relevant and ensures it meets the stakeholder’s expectations.

Lesson 14: Wrapping Up the Project

At last, the project is nearing the end of its life cycle. The team is ready to finish project execution and move on to the next exciting project. But first, you must complete the project closing phase. The team leads the work during the execution phase, but the PM leads the closing phase. During this phase, you will prepare the final reports, hold the final meetings, and send out the last surveys—for this project, at least. This lesson will review the remaining execution phase activities and describe how to move from execution to closing. In addition, you will learn about the requirements to close a project and how the process differs for closed, canceled, and suspended projects.

All necessary course materials are included.

Certification(s):

This course prepares a student to take the CompTIA Project+ PK0-005 national certification exam.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.