The 40 Processes of the PMBOK Guide 8, and the Logic Between Them

Recording of a complementary session INSTAR ran on 30 September 2026 for participants of the PMP exam prep course. It is in English and runs just under two hours.

The eighth edition of the PMBOK Guide organises project work into 40 processes across seven performance domains and five focus areas. Read cold, that grid frightens people.

Three things worth taking from it.

The forty processes are a library, not a running order. The numbered sequence used in the session is one logical way to apply them and nothing more. The PMBOK Guide sits closer to an encyclopedia than to the Scrum Guide. You open the chapter you need. Alina is blunt about how to read it: the two most useful parts of the book are the index and the glossary.

"Plan X management" and "do X" are two different jobs. This is where most people get stuck. Plan schedule management decides the method, the tool, the level of detail, the templates you are obliged to follow. Develop schedule produces the actual file. The same split runs through cost, risk, resources and scope. One answers how, the other produces the artifact.

Expert judgment appears in 30 of the 40 processes. Intuition appears in none. Data analysis is recommended in 27, meetings in 22. That distribution says something about the job. You are not expected to be the expert in all forty areas. You are expected to find the people who are, and to decide on evidence rather than on feel.

There is a case in the middle worth the time on its own. Alina inherits a project with a release committed for October, works the numbers with the architect, security and legal, and concludes that the real date is the following summer. The sponsor, the PMO and the board all had to hear it. They accepted it. Her point is that a constraint written into a charter is a starting assumption open to challenge.

Estimation gets a long practical run through analogous, parametric and bottom-up, using borscht as the worked example, which turns out to be more useful than it sounds.

Timecodes

• 00:00 How the PMBOK processes are organised: seven domains, five focus areas
• 02:12 What each focus area does
• 06:05 What you need to know for the exam, and what you don't
• 09:03 Project Atlas: the example used throughout
• 12:09 Where it starts: the project charter and the assumption log
• 13:52 Why almost everything in planning rests on assumptions
• 17:56 A case: the release that was never going to make October
• 20:48 Stakeholder register, then scope management planning
• 22:31 What quality means in project management
• 25:26 Schedule, risk, and financial management planning
• 29:18 Eliciting requirements, defining scope, building the structure
• 32:19 Resource planning, estimates, and the first schedule
• 37:05 Why "plan X management" and "do X" are separate processes
• 40:26 The soup analogy, and why planning processes run in parallel
• 45:17 Risk planning, risk appetite, and extraterrestrials
• 46:59 Where to find artifact templates
• 48:57 Integrating and aligning the plans
• 51:35 Execution: acquiring resources, leading the team
• 53:35 Monitoring and control, domain by domain
• 58:03 Change requests, deliverables, and validated scope
• 59:52 Governance artifacts: what is created where
• 1:02:50 Scope: management plan vs statement vs baseline
• 1:05:57 Schedule and finance artifacts
• 1:08:05 Stakeholders, resources, risk: processes and artifacts
• 1:12:11 Inputs, outputs, and the tools-and-techniques block
• 1:14:46 "The first process and you already have conflict management"
• 1:20:23 Statistics: expert judgment appears in 30 of 40 processes
• 1:22:20 Data analysis, and why intuition is not on the list
• 1:26:00 Meetings, interpersonal skills, data gathering
• 1:28:08 Measuring performance: variance, trend, earned value
• 1:30:10 Estimation techniques: analogous, parametric, bottom-up
• 1:33:11 How long does it take to cook borscht?
• 1:37:51 Schedule compression, leads and lags, resource optimisation
• 1:40:50 Decision-making and data representation techniques
• 1:45:07 When autocratic decision-making is the right call
• 1:49:40 Self-study: the simulator threshold before you book the exam
• 1:50:24 How to use the PMBOK Guide, as a library rather than a textbook

Speaker

Alina Piddubna, PgMP, PfMP, PMP, PMI-ACP, CPMAI. Director and trainer at INSTAR, PMI Premier Authorized Training Partner.

The session is in English. Questions from course participants are part of the recording.