Did you know that there were major changes made to the Project Management Institute's PMP exam in August 2011? In its never-ending quest to stay true to the real-world practice of project management, PMI introduced some substantial changes to the exam, with about 30% of the questions being replaced or revised. The good news is that although the questions have changed, the underlying material that is tested has not. Here are just a few of the differences, categorized by PMP domain areas:

 

Initiation

- The emphasis is now on the feasibility of the project as opposed to cost/benefit or ROI analysis.

 

Planning

- Must now present the project plan to key project stakeholders, not just to the customer.
- The kick-off meeting (yes, this is in planning not execution!) is now more about presenting information rather than trying to gain consensus.

- There is more of an emphasis on making use of captured lessons learned from prior projects when analyzing the current project's requirements.

 

Execution

- There is now an emphasis on completing deliverables on schedule and within budget.

 

Monitoring and Controlling

- New tasks to create an issues register to record and track issues and related corrective actions, and for overall performance reporting not limited to specific tasks.

 

Closing

- There's now more of an emphasis on efficiently transferring completed project deliverables to facilitate project closure.