 understand that this is not a required credential for the PMP. It's what PMI considers a plus credential. It's an add-on, if you will. As you look at it, really project management comes down to six things. It's the ability to manage scope, quality, schedule, budget or cost, resources, and project risk. Now, when we're talking about risks, risks can occur in any of these other areas. So, although we say it's simple, it's only simple in theory. There's an awful lot of work to be done. And if you stop and think about it, if it really was that easy, wouldn't most of us be out of a job? You know, it really wouldn't be that complicated if projects were that easy to manage. As you look at the PIMBOK guide, the PIMBOK guide is organized into chapters. Those chapters go one through four to outline the basic framework of project management. The basic framework is especially illuminated in chapters 2 and 3. Once you enter in chapter 4 found in the PIMBOK guide, you enter into the first of 10 knowledge areas for the fifth edition of the PIMBOK guide. Previously, there were only nine knowledge areas. These knowledge areas include integration management through the brand-new knowledge area of stakeholder management. Previously, the stakeholder management information was included, but it was included in several of the other knowledge areas. For the purposes of this course, we're going to focus in on the knowledge area of risk management. It's important to note, though, that this particular knowledge area impacts almost every other discussion, every other knowledge area that exists within the PIMBOK guide. When you look at PMI's basic process framework, it creates a very simple organizational structure that almost every major methodology out there for executing projects complies. It starts with someone, a project initiator who has an idea or someone such as a sponsor who wants to begin a project. As you look at those, the first thing that happens is that initiator or sponsor says, hey, this looks like something that should be managed as a project, and so those inputs are brought into the process and you begin that first step, referred to as the initiating process group or initiating processes. Once the project is formally approved to be worked on and managed as a project, you move on to the next step. In that next step, it's called the planning process group or planning processes. Those planning processes work in a loop with the executing processes or executing process group. And those two steps, planning and executing, can be done once or many times depending on the methodology that you and your team are choosing to use. Deciding when you're done planning and executing and back and forth depending on how you're doing your project are your eyes and ears for the project. These are referred to as your monitoring and controlling process groups. Eventually, your monitoring and controlling process groups decide that you've done as much as you possibly can and it's time to kick the project out into the closing processes or closing process group. In so doing, you will end up with two specific outputs. First and most importantly, you have the project deliverables. These are the things that are produced, the products, services and results for which the project was originally undertaken. Additionally, you're going to have your project records or process assets. These are the informational elements that hopefully the team consistently reviews so over time we can get better and better at the execution of our projects. As you look at the different chapters of the Pembach guide or the knowledge areas as they referred, this diagram makes it a little bit easier to understand how the different groupings fit across the five process groups. Now, as was said earlier, in the fifth edition of the Pembach guide, there are 47 distinct processes described. However, only integration management has a process located in each one of these process groups. For the purposes of this course, we're going to be dealing with risk management and if you look most of the way down this chart, you can see that risk management only occurs really in two areas of our project. We see risk management happening in the planning process group. We also see risk management happening in the monitoring and controlling process group. Now, be very careful though in reading this diagram. This is not a linear diagram denoting time. It is not in any way shape or form arguing that the first thing that happens on every project is initiating, then you plan, you execute monitoring control, and then you close out and you're all the way done with the project, and everything happens in that nice neat linear lock step. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, monitoring and controlling is an ongoing process that happens throughout the entire life of the project and that means risk is also happening and being managed throughout the entire life of the project and this is a very, very important notion. With that, that's all we're going to cover about the basics of project management. If you feel uncomfortable about this information and you've never had any kind of exposure to PMI's standards for project management, we highly recommend you take our introduction to project management course that is also available on this site. With that being said, we'd ask you to take a moment to take the quiz that follows before we continue on with our lecture. However, before you take that exam, let me make a quick note about the quizzes that you will experience throughout this course. The quizzes that you see here as much as possible have been designed to represent stylistically the types of questions that you're going to see on the real exam. They are not designed necessarily to teach you the simple basics of risk management and how to work the process. Remember, this is an exam preparation course more than anything else. We want to make sure you get maximum exposure to the types of exam questions you're going to experience in the real world when you go to get your certification. To that end, make sure you're always scoring at least 90% on all the practice quizzes before you ever attempt to take the real thing. With that note in mind, please take a few moments to complete the quiz that follows and then we'll continue. Alright, hopefully you found that first quiz relatively easy. It's really not the type of thing where you're going to see those questions on the exam because that first quiz was designed to be just a general overview of project management and not specifically to the RMP. As you look at PMI's RMP, the first thing we want to talk about is the process required and the standards required in order for you to qualify for the designation. In order to sit for the RMP exam, you have to have a bachelor's degree with 3,000 hours of professional experience leading projects and 30 hours of education in the field of risk management. This specific course has been designed to count as 21 of those hours. As you look at this course, also realize you then, once you submit your experience verification for, must sit for an exam that's 170 questions that takes three and a half hours. Should you not have a bachelor's degree, you are still eligible to sit for the exam. However, if you only have a high school diploma or equivalent, you then must have 4,500 hours of experience, more professional experience, within the last five years working on projects and 40 hours of education in the field of risk management. You then must pass the same exam before you can consider yourself someone carrying the RMP designation. If you look at the process PMI requires you to follow, the first step in the process is to submit your experience verification form or application. The good news is that you can do this process online. In fact, we highly recommend that you do it that way. In so doing, you can create a login and return to PMI's website at PMI.org multiple times so that you don't have to do the entire application in one sitting. The application can be pretty tiresome and require a lot of detailed information and so it might take you two or three sittings. As a general rule, we tell people to plan on spending at least two or three hours going through that application process to make sure you've gotten everything captured and calculated correctly. Once you submit the application and you have 90 days from the date you create your login to submit that application, it's then time for PMI to do their thing. They will take up to five days to review your application and do a completeness review. As they look at your application, there is a chance that your application might be selected for audit. PMI's numbers say that they generally target between 12 and 16 or 18 percent of all applications for audit. Now the first way an application gets audited is by simply putting some accurate information that just stands out to the auditors. Remember, the reviewers who are looking at your application are not RMPs themselves. They are professional folks that have been trained by PMI over a two-week period or so to review these applications and are tasked with getting through as many of them as quickly as possible. To that end, they are largely trained based on PMI's terminology. So if you use terminology from your organization, you make it a lot more difficult on these people and increase the probability that you are yourselves going to be audited. To that end, we strongly recommend you use PMI's terminology for any parts, technical parts of your application. As you go through the certification process then, what's going to happen is PMI is going to review your application. Presumably, you're not going to do any of the common mistakes of significantly over exaggerating your experience, making some very egregious incorrect statement on your application that causes an automatic audit. However, there is a chance that if PMI is not getting a sufficient number of those types of mistakes, they also randomly select applications from time to time for the auditing process. Should that happen to you, you're then given 90 days to provide the additional information requested by PMI. In that audit process, you have to go to every training organization and get a letter from them provided to PMI specifically that you've completed this specific training, that you actually worked where you said you did, you've got to get a letter from your registrar's office if you've got a degree issue, etc. If you're not audited on the other hand and you do get your completeness review, what will happen is that PMI after that five-day period will try to notify you of your acceptance or declination for the RMP exam. That notification, if you've provided an email address, will be done electronically, so we highly recommend that you provide PMI with a valid email address. It's better for you, better for them, a lot faster for you to get the information you need. Once you get that notification, you then need to pay PMI, go through the applicant payment process, and you cannot schedule your exam until you have completed that payment process. If you go through the audit process, again PMI will respond in just a few days after you're getting all of the requested information into them. Once you have completed the payment process, you have one year from the date of your acceptance letter to complete the exam. Once you complete the exam and pass the test, because all of you are going to pass the test because you're going to do exactly what we tell you to do on the test, you're going to be an RMP as soon as you walk out of the room. You're then on a three-year recertification clock and have to get PDUs or continuing education credits to maintain your certification. One last note needs to be made about the test. Out of the 170 question exam, only 150 of the questions are actually scored. 20 of the questions are actually where they're testing the question and not the participant or the test taker. Trying to see if there's a random regular distribution of answers so that the question is valid. When you look at the exam itself, the exam is broken into five specific domains. The first domain is risk strategy and planning and you'll see 19 to 20 percent of the questions in that area. You will see another 19 to 20 percent over the stakeholder engagement process. You will see another 25 to 28 percent of the exam covering the risk process facilitation. And finally, you will see the rest of the exam 19 to 20 percent on risk monitoring and reporting and the performance of specialized risk analyses. We also highly recommend that when you are getting ready to study for this test and do your application that you go to PMI's website and on that website go ahead and find under the certification section the PMI RMP handbook. This handbook walks everybody through all aspects of this exam what's going to be covered, etc. This is going to be a very, very important tool for you in order to be successful. Additionally, it's important that you know the fees that you're going to see on this test. If you're a PMI member, your cost is going to be $520. If you're not a PMI member, the cost for the test is $670. As a general rule, you'll find the cost of PMI membership is $119 plus the cost of any local chapters. So you can see right off the bat joining PMI more than pays for itself just simply with this one exam. That's all that you have to deal with for this particular test. In the next section, we'll introduce risk management and start digging into the specific topics found within each of these domains and give you a better sense of what the questions you're going to experience look like as well as the formalized process for duing risk management. So at this time, take your next quiz before we move on.