I would be answering one of the questions I get asked a lot from PMP aspirants about the PMP exam and preparing for it. The ITTOs for the 49 processes are a lot and most wonder if they have to memorize them which is quite a huge task. This is my personal opinion from experience as well as from my students’ results.
Question:
Do I need to memorize the ITTOs? I am working on understanding them and how they fit the process but wondering if I actually need to memorize them.
Answer:
You don’t have to memorize the ITTOs.
From experience, what you need to do is understand the idea behind each process. That is, understand the purpose for each process and what the process is trying to achieve.
Once you know this, you can almost determine what the ITTOs for each process would be without memorizing them.
For example, consider the Plan communication management process; what is the purpose of this process and what is it trying to achieve?
This process wants to ensure that the information needs of the project are met. Most importantly that the stakeholders receive the right information at the appropriate time.
This means that primarily, I’m planning how to gather information and share them to the stakeholders.
Knowing this, I already know that my inputs would be the Project Management Plan; including the stakeholder management plan and the resource management plan because I want to know how to communicate with my stakeholders and my team members (human resource) are a sub-set of the project stakeholders.
For Tools & Techniques; I know I have to determine the communication method; how would I share the project information with the stakeholders; push, pull or interactive or a mixture of both. I need to determine this in my plan/ communication strategy.
Another tool & technique has to be communication requirement analysis; because this tool and technique help in determining the information needs of the project stakeholders.
For Output; I know that I would definitely produce a Communication Management plan and have updates to my Project Management plan and project documents.
Also, if you look through the ITTO’s you would see a pattern between processes in the same process group. For example, most of the processes in the planning process group that have to do with planning a knowledge area such as:
Plan Scope Management; Schedule Management; Cost Management all have similar Inputs and Tools &Techniques.
Let’s do a check; their inputs are Project Charter, Project Management Plan, EEFs, OPAs and some have Project documents. For tools & Techniques, most of the time, you have Expert Judgement, Data gathering, Data analysis and meetings.
The above explanation and analysis is the reason why I’m of the opinion that you don’t need to memorize the ITTOs rather what you need to do is to understand each process: the purpose/objective and what the process is trying to achieve (the outcome)
You can get my PMP exam preparation bundle; it contains explanatory videos on all the 49 processes that help you with understanding each of them so that you don’t have to memorize the ITTOs. Get it here at a discounted price.
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