A project management plan is only as good as the discipline used to execute against it and the rigor used to control deviations from it. PM5332 treats planning, execution, and control as a continuous feedback loop, not a linear sequence completed once and forgotten.
Building the integrated project management plan
PM5332 teaches students to assemble subsidiary plans — scope management, schedule management, cost management, quality management, risk management, and more — into one integrated project management plan with a consistent baseline. The course emphasizes that these subsidiary plans cannot be written in isolation: the risk management plan must account for the same schedule baseline the schedule management plan defines, and the cost baseline must reflect the resources the resource management plan actually commits.
Execution, monitoring, and variance-based control
Once a project moves into execution, PM5332 shifts to the discipline of monitoring performance against the baseline and controlling variances before they compound. Students practice interpreting schedule and cost variance, deciding when a variance is within normal tolerance versus when it triggers a formal corrective action or a change request, and documenting the difference between corrective action (getting back on the existing plan) and a change request (formally revising the baseline itself).
Key topics in PM5332
- Assembling an integrated project management plan from subsidiary plans
- Setting and maintaining the scope, schedule, and cost baselines
- Directing and managing project work: work authorization and deliverable verification
- Monitoring and controlling: performance reviews, variance analysis, and trend analysis
- Corrective action vs. preventive action vs. defect repair vs. formal change request
- Integrated change control: evaluating and approving changes across the full project plan
- Project closure: final performance review, lessons learned, and formal acceptance
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Worked example: responding to a cost variance during execution
- Monitoring finding: Cost performance index (CPI) drops to 0.88, signaling the project is running over budget for the work completed
- Root cause analysis: Investigation reveals a vendor's hourly rate increased mid-contract without a formal amendment
- Corrective action: Renegotiate vendor terms and tighten approval on billable hours going forward — this gets the project back toward the existing baseline
- Change request (if needed): If the rate increase cannot be reversed, a formal change request updates the cost baseline to reflect the new reality, rather than silently absorbing the overage
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Frequently asked questions
Corrective action is any action taken to realign the future performance of the project with the existing project management plan — it does not change the baseline, it simply gets execution back on track toward the plan that was already approved. A change request, by contrast, is a formal proposal to modify the baseline itself — the scope, schedule, cost, or another plan component — because the existing plan is no longer achievable or appropriate. PM5332 teaches that mixing these up is a common error: quietly revising a schedule baseline to hide a delay is not corrective action, it's an undocumented change that should have gone through formal change control; conversely, treating every minor deviation as requiring a full change request creates unnecessary bureaucratic overhead when a simple corrective action would suffice.
Subsidiary plans like the schedule management plan, cost management plan, and risk management plan all describe different facets of the same underlying project, and if they are written in isolation, they will almost certainly contain contradictions — for instance, a risk management plan might assume a 10% schedule contingency that the schedule management plan doesn't actually include, or a quality management plan might specify testing activities that were never budgeted for in the cost plan. PM5332 teaches that integration management exists specifically to catch and resolve these contradictions before they become on-the-ground problems, which is why the course treats the project management plan as a single integrated document with cross-referenced subsidiary plans, rather than a folder of separately authored documents that happen to describe the same project.