Project Life Cycles and Processes

A project is temporary and produces something unique; a program is a group of related projects managed together for benefits you couldn't get by running them separately; a portfolio is a collection of projects, programs and other work grouped to meet a strategic business goal. Operations, by contrast, is ongoing and repetitive — keeping the lights on, not creating something new. CAPM candidates are expected to sort a described piece of work into the right one of these four buckets on sight.

The exam also leans hard on four words people use loosely in conversation but that mean specific, different things here: an assumption is something you believe to be true without proof, a constraint is a limiting factor on your options, a risk is an uncertain event that may or may not happen, and an issue is a problem that has already happened and needs a decision now. A predictive (plan-based) approach plans the work in detail up front and executes to that plan; an adaptive approach plans in short cycles and adjusts as it learns — this Domain only asks you to recognize which is being described, Domains II and III go deeper on each.

Study focus: the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (built on responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty) shows up as situational judgment questions — a scenario where someone is pressured to hide a problem from a sponsor, for instance — more often than as a direct definition question. A project is also explicitly framed as a vehicle for organizational change: it exists to move something from a current state to a better one, not just to produce a deliverable in isolation.