Subtitles of the Movie

To date, we've covered the initiating process group objectives and reviewed the processes. A final thing I'd like to do before moving on to the next process group is review the relationship amongst the processes and the flow of the processes within the group; something similar to our view of the overall project flow earlier on in the course. Because the initiating process group only has two processes, this will be a quick review. We already mentioned that the output of the first process is the project charter. As we learned in the previous movie, the project charter is an input into the second process, which is develop preliminary project scope statement. Therefore, we see a relationship between the two processes where the output of the first is a requirement to begin the second. As a review, the first process starts the project or the project phase and the second defines what the project or project phase's purpose and objectives are. You might be wondering what kind of questions you will see in the exam pertaining to the process groups. Again, if you understand the process and when that process would occur, you can use logic to think through the question and figure out the answer. Of course, if this information is new to you it will be very important to spend enough time familiarizing yourself with the PMIisms, which simply refer to the PMI's terminology to understand what they are referring to. Some questions may look like this. In which project management process group is the Project Manager assigned to the project? There'll be a bit more challenging than this one, but I wanted to give you an example that you would recognize based on what we've already covered so far. There are a few ways that you can think through questions like this one because you could typically relate it to a process group or to a Knowledge Area. Another sample is which is an output of the initiating process group? If you familiarize yourself with the objectives of the process groups, you can nail these. I referenced earlier a worksheet located in your work files that you could print out and write you notes in. This exercise will help you familiarize yourself with the process groups and the processes within them enough to answer these questions. Let me give you a third type of example. The project charter has just been issued. What is the next thing to do? Now, these questions are fairly tricky. Usually at least three options will look like great responses. The best approach here is to start off with eliminating the ones that don't fit. Next think through the dependencies within the processes, such as what we did at the start of the movie. Chances are that those three options that look good are all correct, but only one of them would come next, which is a key piece to this question here. And that wraps up this movie and also our section on the initiating process group. Next we will move into our Planning Process Group.