What to Study for the CompTIA Project+ PK0-005 Exam

The CompTIA Project+ certification validates the foundational skills needed to manage small to medium-sized projects and support larger projects in an information technology environment.

The PK0-005 exam covers the complete project life cycle, including project initiation, planning, execution, and closure. It also measures your ability to coordinate resources, communicate with stakeholders, manage documentation, select project tools, and account for security, compliance, and governance requirements.

CompTIA recommends 6 to 12 months of hands-on experience managing projects in an IT environment. This experience is recommended rather than required. There are no formal prerequisites for taking the exam.

This guide breaks down the four PK0-005 domains and explains what you should study for each part of the CompTIA Project+ exam.

CompTIA Project+ Exam Format

  • Exam code: PK0-005
  • Number of questions: Maximum of 90
  • Question types: Multiple-choice and performance-based
  • Testing time: 90 minutes
  • Recommended experience: 6 to 12 months managing projects in an IT environment

The performance-based questions require you to apply project management knowledge to simulated situations. You may need to select the appropriate document, interpret a chart, respond to a risk or issue, place activities in the correct order, or determine the best action for a project scenario.

What Is on the CompTIA Project+ Exam?

Domain Exam Weight
Project Management Concepts 33%
Project Life Cycle Phases 30%
Tools and Documentation 19%
Basics of IT and Governance 18%

Domain 1: Project Management Concepts

Exam weight: 33%

Project Management Concepts is the largest domain in PK0-005. It covers project characteristics, methodologies, change control, risk and issue management, scheduling, quality, communication, meetings, resources, and procurement.

Projects, Programs, and Portfolios

Understand the characteristics that distinguish a project from ongoing operational work. A project has a defined beginning and end, creates a unique result, and has a specific purpose.

You should also understand how projects may be grouped within programs and portfolios:

  • A project produces a specific deliverable or result.
  • A program coordinates related projects to obtain benefits that would not be available if they were managed separately.
  • A portfolio groups projects and programs to support organizational strategy.

Project Methodologies and Frameworks

Review the purposes and basic characteristics of:

  • Agile
  • Waterfall
  • Scrum
  • Kanban
  • Extreme programming
  • Scaled Agile Framework
  • PRINCE2
  • Software Development Life Cycle
  • DevOps
  • DevSecOps

Be prepared to compare Agile and Waterfall based on requirements, schedule, budget, tolerance for change, team structure, resource commitment, organizational culture, and communication methods.

Change Control

Know how to apply the change control process throughout the project life cycle:

  1. Create or receive the change request.
  2. Record the request in the change log.
  3. Conduct a preliminary review.
  4. Assess the effect on scope, schedule, cost, quality, and risk.
  5. Document a recommendation.
  6. Submit the change to the authorized decision-maker or change control board.
  7. Record and communicate the decision.
  8. Update the project plan if the change is approved.
  9. Implement and validate the change.
  10. Communicate the deployment of the change.

Remember that a team should not implement a requested change simply because a stakeholder considers it urgent. The change must be evaluated and approved in accordance with the project’s change control process.

Risk Management

A risk is an uncertain event or condition that could affect a project. Risks may present threats or opportunities.

Know the strategies used to address negative risks:

  • Accept: Acknowledge the threat without taking immediate preventive action.
  • Avoid: Change the plan to remove the threat.
  • Mitigate: Reduce the probability or impact of the threat.
  • Transfer: Shift responsibility for the threat to another party.

Know the strategies used to address positive risks:

  • Accept: Take advantage of the opportunity if it occurs.
  • Enhance: Increase the probability or benefit of the opportunity.
  • Exploit: Act to ensure the opportunity occurs.
  • Share: Assign some or all ownership to a party better able to capture the opportunity.

Review qualitative and quantitative risk analysis, probability and impact, simulations, scenario analysis, contingency plans, fallback plans, ownership, and escalation.

Issue Management

A risk is uncertain, while an issue is a problem that has already occurred. Issue management includes:

  • Recording the issue
  • Assigning an owner
  • Assessing severity, urgency, and impact
  • Performing root cause analysis
  • Developing a resolution or workaround
  • Escalating when necessary
  • Implementing contingency plans
  • Documenting the outcome

Be able to distinguish among the risk register, issue log, change log, and defect log based on the information being tracked.

Schedule Management

Study activity sequencing, dependencies, milestones, resource loading, estimation, story points, sprint planning, backlog prioritization, buffers, forecasting, and critical path analysis.

Know the four common dependency relationships:

  • Finish-to-start
  • Finish-to-finish
  • Start-to-start
  • Start-to-finish

You should also understand mandatory, discretionary, internal, and external dependencies and recognize when a schedule baseline should be revised or formally rebaselined.

Quality and Performance Management

Review:

  • Retrospectives and lessons learned
  • Sprint reviews
  • Service-level agreements
  • Key performance indicators
  • Objectives and key results
  • Cost variance and schedule variance
  • Audits and inspections
  • Verification and validation
  • Post-implementation support and warranty periods

For IT projects, understand the purposes of unit, smoke, regression, stress, performance, and user acceptance testing.

Communication and Meeting Management

Be able to select communication methods based on the audience, message, urgency, confidentiality, and geographic distribution of the project team.

Communication may be:

  • Synchronous or asynchronous
  • Written or verbal
  • Formal or informal
  • Internal or external

Study how language barriers, time zones, culture, and technology affect communication. Know when to revise the communication plan or escalate a communication problem.

For meetings, review:

  • Collaborative, informative, and decision-making meetings
  • Agendas and target audiences
  • Facilitator and scribe responsibilities
  • Timeboxing
  • Meeting minutes
  • Action items and follow-up

Team and Resource Management

Know the differences among functional, matrix, and projectized organizational structures. Review human, physical, and capital resources, as well as shared, dedicated, internal, and external resources.

Be able to identify the responsibilities of:

  • Project sponsors
  • Stakeholders
  • Project and program managers
  • Product owners and product managers
  • Scrum masters
  • Business analysts
  • Subject matter experts
  • Developers and architects
  • Quality assurance specialists
  • The project management office
  • End users

Review the forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning stages of team development. Understand how gap analysis can identify missing skills, resources, functionality, or capacity.

Procurement and Vendor Selection

Compare building, buying, leasing, and subscribing to a resource. Know the purposes of:

  • Request for information
  • Request for proposal
  • Request for bid
  • Request for quote
  • Statement of work
  • Terms of reference
  • Purchase orders
  • Master service agreements
  • Nondisclosure agreements

Study fixed-price, cost-plus, time-and-materials, and unit-price contracts. Be prepared to evaluate vendors based on cost, value, qualifications, references, technical approach, financial capacity, and ability to meet requirements.

Domain 2: Project Life Cycle Phases

Exam weight: 30%

This domain covers the work performed from the earliest project concept through formal closure.

Discovery and Concept Preparation

Before a project is formally authorized, an organization evaluates why the project should be undertaken. Review:

  • Business cases and business objectives
  • Return on investment
  • Current-state and future-state analysis
  • Prequalified vendors
  • Existing contracts
  • Capital expenses and operational expenses

Initiation

During initiation, the project is formally defined and authorized. Activities include:

  • Developing the project charter
  • Defining objectives and success criteria
  • Creating a preliminary scope statement
  • Identifying and assessing stakeholders
  • Developing a responsibility assignment matrix
  • Establishing communication channels
  • Defining access and records-management requirements
  • Reviewing existing artifacts
  • Determining the solution design
  • Conducting the project kickoff

Know how to interpret a RACI matrix:

  • Responsible: Performs the work.
  • Accountable: Owns the result and approves the work.
  • Consulted: Provides input.
  • Informed: Receives updates.

Planning

Planning translates the project’s goals into a detailed approach. Review how to:

  • Assess and assign resources
  • Identify procurement needs
  • Train project team members
  • Develop the communication plan
  • Create the detailed scope statement
  • Develop a work breakdown structure or backlog
  • Create the schedule and establish cadence
  • Determine budget considerations
  • Develop a quality assurance plan
  • Perform the initial risk assessment
  • Create transition, release, and operational handoff plans
  • Establish baselines, milestones, and a minimum viable product

Execution

During execution, the team performs the planned work and produces project deliverables. The project manager monitors progress, coordinates meetings, manages vendors, updates the budget and timeline, communicates status, and resolves conflicts.

Know the common conflict-management approaches:

  • Collaborating
  • Compromising
  • Smoothing
  • Forcing
  • Avoiding

Execution also includes organizational change management. The team may need to provide training, support adoption, update processes and knowledge bases, communicate the change, and reinforce new behaviors over time.

Closure

Project closure is more than completing the final deliverable. Important activities include:

  • Evaluating the project
  • Validating deliverables
  • Obtaining project sign-off
  • Closing contracts
  • Removing system access
  • Releasing resources
  • Reconciling the budget
  • Collecting stakeholder feedback
  • Conducting the closure meeting
  • Completing the closeout report
  • Archiving project documentation
  • Recognizing the project team

Domain 3: Tools and Documentation

Exam weight: 19%

This domain requires you to recognize which project tool, chart, report, or document is most useful in a particular situation.

Project Tracking Tools

Review the purposes of:

  • Gantt charts: Display activities and durations across a timeline.
  • PERT charts: Show activity sequencing and support schedule estimation.
  • Project network diagrams: Display dependencies and workflow.
  • Milestone charts: Show major project events or decision points.
  • Budget burndown charts: Track budget consumption over time.
  • Project organizational charts: Show team structure and reporting relationships.

Logs, Registers, and Reports

Know when to use:

  • Risk registers and risk reports
  • Issue logs
  • Defect logs
  • Change logs
  • Project dashboards
  • Status reports
  • Task boards
  • Time-tracking tools
  • Requirements traceability matrices
  • Version-control tools

Productivity and Collaboration Tools

Review email, chat, video, telephone, conferencing, file-sharing, real-time editing, workflow, electronic signature, calendaring, whiteboard, and knowledge-base tools.

Be able to compare cloud-based and on-premises project management solutions based on accessibility, collaboration, security, control, maintenance, and organizational requirements.

Quality and Performance Charts

Understand what information can be obtained from:

  • Histograms
  • Pareto charts
  • Run charts
  • Scatter diagrams
  • Fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams
  • Control charts
  • Burnup and burndown charts
  • Velocity charts
  • Decision trees

Do not study these tools as isolated definitions. Practice identifying which chart would best answer a specific project question. For example, a fishbone diagram helps organize potential root causes, while a Pareto chart helps identify the categories responsible for the greatest number of problems.

Domain 4: Basics of IT and Governance

Exam weight: 18%

This domain connects project management with the technical, regulatory, security, and organizational environments in which IT projects operate.

Environmental, Social, and Governance Factors

Review how a project may affect:

  • The local and global environment
  • Applicable regulations and standards
  • The organization’s mission, vision, and values
  • The organization’s reputation and brand value

Questions may require you to recognize that a project decision can be technically feasible while still conflicting with organizational values, environmental goals, or regulatory expectations.

Information Security

Understand how project work may be affected by:

  • Facility and physical access controls
  • Mobile devices and removable media
  • Background checks and clearance requirements
  • Resource access and permissions
  • Remote-access restrictions
  • Multifactor authentication
  • Data classification
  • Need-to-know access
  • Corporate security policies

Project managers do not need to perform every technical security task, but they must recognize when security requirements affect project scope, resources, access, scheduling, communication, or deliverables.

Privacy and Compliance

Review the protection of personally identifiable information, protected health information, intellectual property, trade secrets, and other sensitive data.

Be prepared to consider:

  • Legal and regulatory requirements
  • Country, state, or province-specific privacy rules
  • Industry-specific compliance requirements
  • Data retention and disposal requirements
  • Restrictions on accessing or sharing project information

Basic IT Concepts

Understand basic concepts involving:

  • Computing infrastructure
  • Networks and connectivity
  • Storage and data warehouses
  • Multitiered architecture
  • Platform as a service
  • Infrastructure as a service
  • Software as a service
  • Anything as a service
  • Enterprise resource planning systems
  • Customer relationship management systems
  • Databases
  • Content and document management systems
  • Financial systems

IT Change Control

Operational IT change control may require:

  • Scheduling maintenance windows
  • Notifying customers and users
  • Creating rollback plans
  • Performing validation checks
  • Managing software and infrastructure changes
  • Documenting implementation results

Distinguish project change control from operational IT change control. Project change control evaluates modifications to the project, while operational change control manages changes to production technology environments.

How to Study for the CompTIA Project+ Exam

Prioritize the Two Largest Domains

Project Management Concepts and Project Life Cycle Phases account for 63% of the exam. Spend substantial time learning how project activities, decisions, roles, and documents relate to one another.

Do not overlook Tools and Documentation or Basics of IT and Governance. Together, these domains account for 37% of the exam and may require precise distinctions between similar concepts.

Study Processes in Context

Instead of memorizing a list of terms, connect each action to the appropriate phase and situation. Ask:

  • What phase of the project is taking place?
  • Which document should contain this information?
  • Who has the authority to make this decision?
  • Is this an uncertain risk or an active issue?
  • Does the proposed action require change approval?
  • Which stakeholder needs to be consulted or informed?
  • What should happen before the team implements the change?

Compare Similar Terms

Create comparison tables or flashcards for concepts that are easy to confuse, such as:

  • Risk versus issue
  • Mitigate versus transfer
  • Project versus program versus portfolio
  • RFI versus RFQ versus RFP
  • Verification versus validation
  • Capital expenses versus operational expenses
  • Project change control versus IT operational change control
  • Risk register versus issue log versus change log

Practice Interpreting Project Artifacts

Performance-based questions may require you to work with project information rather than recall a definition. Practice reading schedules, RACI matrices, risk registers, task boards, network diagrams, status reports, and quality charts.

Use the Exact Wording of the Question

Several answer choices may describe reasonable project actions. Look for words such as first, next, best, or most appropriate.

Before choosing an answer, ask:

  • What has already happened?
  • What must happen before the proposed action?
  • Which response follows the approved project process?
  • Which option addresses the exact problem in the scenario?
  • Which action is within the project manager’s authority?

Practice Under Timed Conditions

The exam includes up to 90 questions in 90 minutes. Some performance-based questions may take longer than standard multiple-choice questions, so timed practice can help you build an efficient pace.

Start Preparing for the CompTIA Project+ Exam

Pocket Prep’s CompTIA Project+ practice questions help you review all four PK0-005 domains and apply project management concepts to realistic IT project scenarios. Each question includes a detailed explanation so you can understand why each answer is correct or incorrect and focus your study time on weaker areas.