PMP Exam Prep 2026: All 26 ECO Tasks, Agile, Hybrid & AI

Learn how to create and sustain a shared project vision that aligns stakeholders, guides priorities, and keeps delivery focused on value.

You’ll distinguish vision from scope, explore practical co-creation techniques, keep the vision current as conditions change, and diagnose the root causes of vision misalignment across predictive, agile, and hybrid projects.

ECO: People — Task 1: Develop a common vision

This lecture introduces the Adaptive Leadership Framework and shows you how to shift your leadership style based on your team’s maturity, the context you’re in, and how much pressure the project is under. You’ll work through the framework’s three lenses: Me (the leader), We (the team), and Us (the organization) and the Adaptability Mindset that holds them together: Agility, Resilience, and Continuous Learning. By the end, you’ll know how to read a situation and choose the right style, which is exactly what the PMP scenario questions in the People domain test. The three-lens model here is a course framework rather than PMI terminology; you won’t see it named on the exam, but the situational judgment it trains is exactly what the People domain asks for.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team

Learn how high-performing teams create predictable execution through shared commitments, role clarity, and consistent operating rhythms.

You'll explore the accountability loop, the behaviours that define high-performing teams, and how to address execution breakdowns without resorting to micromanagement.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team

This lecture reframes conflict management from a "soft skill" into a defining strategic capability for senior project leaders, especially in an environment where AI accelerates decisions, amplifies disagreement, and changes how teams collaborate.

You'll learn the four sources of conflict, how to read the stage of escalation as well as the source, the five classic resolution techniques the exam tests you on, how ground rules prevent conflict before it starts, and how to use AI as a partner in navigating conflict without letting it replace your judgment.

ECO: People — Task 2: Manage conflicts

Great project managers aren’t just organized; they’re emotionally intelligent. You’ll learn what emotional intelligence means for a project leader, why PMI folds it into the People domain, and how to recognize the emotionally intelligent answer in a scenario question. You’ll break EI into its four core domains, see how it drives both leadership-style choices and conflict handling, and pick up three decision cues for exam day. Short, practical, and built to make a whole category of People-domain questions easier.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team · Supporting: People — Task 2: Manage conflicts

Knowledge that lives in one person's head is a project risk. In this lecture, you'll learn how project managers identify critical knowledge, capture it before it walks out the door, and build a team environment where sharing is the default. Covers tacit vs. explicit knowledge, lessons learned as a living register, and how knowledge transfer differs from continuous improvement on the exam.

ECO: People — Task 7: Help ensure knowledge transfer

Understand why stakeholder engagement sits at the heart of both the PMP® exam and successful project delivery. You’ll meet five common stakeholder groups, learn why keeping people informed is not enough, and distinguish between aligning expectations and managing them.

This lecture establishes the foundation for the stakeholder tools and engagement practices used throughout the section.

ECO: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders

You can’t engage people you haven’t found, and you can’t engage them well until you understand where their power and interest actually lie. You’ll work through the first half of People Task 4: identifying every stakeholder who can affect your project, then analyzing them to decide where to spend your limited attention.

You’ll learn the classic Power/Interest grid and, just as importantly, the Salience model for the messier, more political situations where a simple grid isn’t enough. By the end you’ll be able to look at any stakeholder landscape and know who to manage closely, who to keep satisfied, and who you’re about to overlook at your peril.

ECO: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders

Analysis is worthless until it changes what you actually do. You’ll complete People Task 4 by turning stakeholder analysis into action: defining a communication strategy, tailoring each message to what that stakeholder genuinely needs, and executing the engagement plan instead of letting it gather dust.

You’ll learn the Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix, the tool that exposes the gap between where a stakeholder is and where you need them to be, and you’ll see how engagement works across predictive, agile and hybrid delivery — because roughly 60% of the 2026 exam sits in adaptive or hybrid territory, and engagement looks very different when you’re running sprints instead of sending status reports.

ECO: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders · Supporting: People — Task 8: Plan and manage communication

Getting stakeholders engaged is one thing. Getting them to agree with each other is something else entirely, and it's where many projects quietly fall apart.

Learn how to align stakeholders whose definitions of success, priorities, and constraints don't initially match. You’ll group stakeholders, uncover their underlying expectations, facilitate conversations that reconcile competing needs, and recognize when mentoring can strengthen alignment. The emphasis is on helping stakeholders reach workable agreement before differences become project conflict.

ECO: People — Task 5: Align stakeholder expectations

Distinguish between aligning stakeholder expectations and managing them throughout delivery. You’ll learn how to monitor the satisfaction of internal and external customers, respond when expectations or satisfaction begin to drift, and connect stakeholder outcomes with project governance.

The lecture also brings together the section’s identification, analysis, communication, alignment, and engagement practices.

ECO: People — Task 6: Manage stakeholder expectations

Power/Interest tells you how much attention a stakeholder deserves. It doesn’t tell you what actually moves them. BRIDGE is a six-part lens for your most influential relationships: business impact, relationship networks, interest, decision authority, goal alignment, and expectations.

You’ll use it to anticipate how a stakeholder behaves under pressure and to build a tailored approach for each critical relationship. BRIDGE is a course framework, not PMI terminology — the acronym won’t appear on the exam, but the six questions behind it are exactly what influence scenarios test.

ECO: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders

Most of what sits in your risk register is a symptom, not a cause. Trace the entries back and a surprising share resolve to the same root: two stakeholders who never agreed on what success looks like.

You’ll learn to read a risk register diagnostically, map each significant risk to the misalignment behind it, and fix the disagreement instead of managing the symptom. You’ll also see why the exam so often rewards a stakeholder move in a question that looks, on the surface, purely like a risk question.

ECO: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 5: Plan and manage risk

Your team isn’t in one building anymore. This turns cultural difference from a source of friction into a leadership edge. You’ll learn what cultural intelligence is, the four dimensions behind most cross-cultural misreadings, and an Ask–Observe–Adapt–Align discipline for leading diverse, distributed teams.

It ties straight to the People domain enabler that asks you to support the team’s varied experiences, skills and perspectives, and you’ll finish with three decision cues for scenario questions about virtual or multicultural teams.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team · Supporting: People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders

Agile is a mindset before it is a method. This opening lecture of Agile Project Management Foundations and Mindset introduces what Agile actually is, why the pace of change has made it necessary, and how it evolved from lightweight software practices in the 1990s into enterprise-wide ways of working.

By the end of this lecture, you will be able to describe the Agile mindset in your own words, explain the four values and twelve principles at a high level, and recognize where Agile, predictive, and hybrid approaches each fit.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery · Supporting: People — Task 3: Lead the project team

Learn how the four Agile Manifesto values guide decisions when people, delivery, collaboration, change, documentation, contracts, and plans compete for attention. You’ll examine what each value prioritizes, what it does not reject, and how to recognize the value that should guide the next action in a PMP® exam scenario.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Knowing the four values isn’t the same as spotting them under time pressure. You’ll turn each Manifesto value into a cue you can apply in seconds: what a scenario looks like when individuals and interactions should win, when working software should win, when collaboration beats contract, and when responding to change beats following the plan. You’ll also see the distractor pattern that makes the process-first answer look responsible when it isn’t.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Turn the twelve Agile principles into four practical themes: deliver value early, build around empowered people, sustain quality and pace, and reflect and improve. You’ll learn the behaviours behind the principles and recognize how they guide decisions about collaboration, changing requirements, incremental delivery, technical excellence, simplicity, and continuous improvement.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Convert each of the twelve Agile principles into a quick decision cue for scenario questions. You’ll learn which behaviours signal customer value, collaboration, team empowerment, incremental delivery, sustainable pace, built-in quality, simplicity, self-organization, and continuous improvement—and which responses conflict with agile thinking.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Trace the Agile idea from its roots in Lean thinking and Kanban to a versatile approach used well beyond software. You’ll examine the range of work types inside an organization — from definable, plan-driven work with clear requirements and low risk, through to high-uncertainty, innovation-driven endeavors — and learn how to select and tailor the right life cycle for each context. That selection judgment is the single most-tested idea in the Process domain.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 7: Support organizational change

Explore how an agile project manager’s mindset shapes transparency, psychological safety, delivery flow, and team performance. You’ll compare two common mindset failures, trace organizational waste back to its underlying causes, and learn how to diagnose scenario questions through a people-first, value-focused lens.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team · Supporting: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

This lecture opens Section 5. We classify project life cycles into two families: predictive and adaptive. Predictive leans on heavy up-front planning. Adaptive stays flexible so the team can respond as requirements change.

By the end, you will be able to place any project on the predictive-to-adaptive spectrum, and you will keep the project life cycle separate from the product life cycle. That distinction shows up on the exam.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Predictive life cycles: the traditional, plan-driven family you placed on the spectrum in the opening lecture. This lecture takes that setting apart: the one-sentence definition, the five pillars that make the plan trustworthy, where the model genuinely fits, and the four ways it breaks.

You already know how predictive differs from adaptive. Here you learn why it behaves the way it does, and what that behaviour looks like in an exam question.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Adaptive life cycles plan and deliver in short cycles: plan, build, review, adjust, repeat. You’ll cover what characterizes adaptive delivery and where its benefits actually come from, then work through the three adaptive models the exam distinguishes — iterative, incremental and flow-based — and the trap of using those three words interchangeably. You’ll finish able to name which model a scenario is describing purely from how the team handles feedback and release.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

No single life cycle fits every project, and the 2026 exam tests whether you can adjust one properly. You’ll work through hybrid life cycles and the factors that drive tailoring — product uncertainty, delivery cadence, regulatory constraint, team distribution, organizational culture — and how to run traditional and agile work on the same project without either half undermining the other.

You’ll also learn the tailoring answer pattern the exam consistently rewards: change the approach to fit the project, never the project to fit the approach.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Lean began on Japanese factory floors and ended up underneath most of modern agile. Its aim is simple: maximize customer value while removing everything that doesn’t create it.

You’ll examine Lean’s three focal points — value, flow and people — the seven principles of Lean software development, the seven wastes, and the delivery benefits Lean practices actually produce. You’ll finish with the cues that tell you a scenario is asking about flow rather than about a named framework.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Learn how Kanban turns Lean flow principles into a practical work-management system. You’ll explore its guiding principles and core practices, visualize work, limit work in progress, identify bottlenecks, and use lead time and throughput to evaluate flow. You’ll also learn how to keep a Kanban system healthy and recognize common exam traps.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Discover how Disciplined Agile helps teams choose and evolve a way of working that fits their context. You’ll distinguish a flexible toolkit from a prescriptive framework, examine DA’s core pillars and mindset, and learn how Guided Continuous Improvement supports informed choices drawn from agile, Lean, and traditional practices.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Learn how Scrum combines iterative and incremental delivery through short, fixed sprints. You’ll examine the accountabilities of the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers; the pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation; and the events that structure each sprint. You’ll also learn to distinguish product reviews from retrospectives and recognize common Scrum scenario traps.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Learn how SAFe coordinates Lean and agile delivery across multiple teams, programs, and portfolios. You’ll examine the scaling problems SAFe addresses, its configurations, and the principles of economic decision-making, systems thinking, and decentralized authority. The lecture also considers both the potential benefits and the organizational and cultural costs of adopting SAFe.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Traditional estimating asks one expert for a precise number, often months before the work starts, and it is almost always wrong. This lecture opens the section by establishing why relative sizing outperforms absolute time, how team-based estimation builds genuine ownership, what a story point actually measures, and how velocity turns estimates into a forecast. It also draws the line the exam tests hardest: the difference between an estimate and a commitment.

ECO: Process — Task 8: Plan and manage schedule · Supporting: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Planning Poker is the most widely used agile estimation technique, and it works for a reason most people miss: the simultaneous reveal exists to stop anchoring. You’ll walk the full process, see why the discussion between reveals carries more value than the number itself, and learn how to handle the outlier who says 8 when everyone else says 2. You’ll also see what happens to the estimate the moment a manager joins the round.

ECO: Process — Task 8: Plan and manage schedule · Supporting: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

You can’t estimate a backlog you don’t understand. Story mapping, popularized by Jeff Patton, turns a flat prioritized list into a two-dimensional picture of the product: the user’s journey across the top, supporting work beneath it, and release lines running horizontally to show what actually ships.

You’ll see what goes wrong with flat backlogs, how a map gets built, and how breaking scope down this way makes every other estimation technique in this section more accurate.

ECO: Process — Task 2: Develop and manage project scope · Supporting: Process — Task 8: Plan and manage schedule

When Planning Poker feels too heavy, or when you need to size a large backlog quickly, T-shirt sizing and affinity estimation get you there in a fraction of the time. This lecture explains when simplicity beats precision, how to sort work into coarse buckets against a reference story, and how a silent affinity sort lets five people size around fifty items in an hour. You will learn the trade-off you are making, how to convert sizes into point ranges when a forecast needs it, and the traps that turn a deliberately rough estimate into an accidental commitment.

ECO: Process — Task 8: Plan and manage schedule

This lecture is not about learning a new estimating technique. It is about recognizing which one a PMP exam scenario is pointing at. You will learn the decision cues for T-shirt sizing, affinity estimation and Wideband Delphi; the speed-versus-precision trade-off that underlies all three; and why the exam consistently rewards collaboration, bias reduction and progressive elaboration over precision. By the end, you will read the situation rather than hunt for a technique name.

ECO: Process — Task 8: Plan and manage schedule

Most project failures aren’t execution failures; they’re the result of solving a problem nobody framed properly. You’ll learn to assess a project’s needs, complexity and magnitude before committing to an approach, spot the blind spots that make a plan look sound when it isn’t, and ask the questions that separate the presenting problem from the real one.

You’ll then build prevention into the plan itself rather than bolting it on once delivery is under way — which is exactly the move the exam rewards.

ECO: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery · Supporting: People — Task 3: Lead the project team; Business Environment — Task 4: Remove impediments and manage issues

A strong problem statement doesn’t just describe frustration; it identifies the observable gap, who or what it affects, and why the gap matters. That creates a stable basis for analysis, decision-making and later risk work without locking the team into a solution too early.

You’ll learn to break down a situation, separate evidence from assumption, and align stakeholders on the problem before anyone proposes an answer.

ECO: People — Task 3: Lead the project team · Supporting: Process — Task 1: Develop an integrated project management plan and plan delivery

Diagnosis and framing are behind you; now you manage uncertainty from identification through monitoring. You’ll work the full risk lifecycle — identify, analyze, prioritize, plan responses, monitor and control — and see how the artifacts, the events and the level of formality shift between predictive, agile and hybrid delivery while the thinking underneath stays constant.

That constancy is the point: the exam expects consistent risk judgment no matter what the delivery approach looks like.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 5: Plan and manage risk

A response isn’t complete because a strategy label appears in the register. It needs an owner, funded or scheduled actions, a measurable trigger, and — where the exposure justifies it — a contingency or fallback.

You’ll learn how to build responses at that level of detail, how to write triggers you can actually observe, and how to recognize the moment a risk stops being a risk and becomes an issue you have to manage.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 5: Plan and manage risk · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 4: Remove impediments and manage issues

This is the capstone of the section. You’ve diagnosed complexity, framed the real problem, managed the risk lifecycle and designed trigger-based responses. Now you make sure the work gets the right priority.

A backlog is a decision system: it should make value, exposure, learning, dependencies and timing visible rather than behaving as a feature wish list. You’ll learn to order it so the riskiest assumptions get tested early and the highest-value work ships first.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 5: Plan and manage risk · Supporting: Process — Task 3: Help ensure value-based delivery

Organizational change will hit your project: a reorg, a new policy, a sponsor who moves on, and shifting priorities mid-delivery. The PMP exam has a task for exactly that — along with one mistake that quietly costs candidates points: answering as the transformation consultant instead of the project manager.

You'll get the two things Task 7 actually asks for (assess the organizational culture and evaluate the impact of the change on your project), plus the four categories that cover nearly every impediment the exam will hand you: people and culture, structure and governance, leadership and stakeholders, and ways of working.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 7: Support organizational change

Resistance is loud. A fixed mindset is quiet — the training happened, the language changed, and the behaviour didn't move. This lecture shows you how the PMP® exam tests that gap under Business Environment, Task 7: Support Organizational Change.

You'll learn to spot the exam's fixed-mindset signals (the "agile won't work here" objection, clinging to detailed long-range plans), diagnose the three root causes behind culture scenarios — a system built for predictability, low psychological safety, and identity built on control — and apply the four strategies the exam credits: coach rather than train, make the mindset visible, lead by example, and create safe experiments. Closes with a stalled bank transformation worked the way you'd read a question stem.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 7: Support organizational change

Two connected leadership barriers can stall organizational change: weak executive sponsorship and middle-management resistance. This lecture explains how to assess the underlying cultural and role impacts, activate sponsorship, engage managers, and use governance paths when decisions or issues exceed the project manager’s authority.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 7: Support organizational change · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 1: Define and establish project governance; People — Task 4: Engage stakeholders

Most wrong answers on this exam aren’t wrong facts; they’re right facts at the wrong altitude. You’ll learn the altitude rule — what a project manager can and cannot do inside a scenario — plus five recurring answer patterns, PMI’s verb cues, and the three distractor types that turn up in almost every form. Two worked examples close it out, taken apart the way you’d read a real question stem.

ECO: Exam technique — no task mapping.

PMI put sustainability on the exam for a reason. This lecture shows you what that means on an actual project. You will learn where sustainability requirements come from, where they belong in your plan, and how to talk about their cost in a way a sponsor will accept. You will also get five dimensions to check and one lifecycle question that changes most decisions.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 2: Plan and manage project compliance · Supporting: Process — Task 7: Plan and optimize quality of products/deliverables

Regulation is one of the few things that can invalidate a plan overnight. This lecture gives you a working map of the global privacy landscape and, more importantly, a method for turning any regulation into something your project can act on. You will learn how to classify compliance categories, how to spot threats to compliance before they become issues, and what the exam expects you to do when the rules change mid-project.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 2: Plan and manage project compliance · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 8: Evaluate external business environment changes

Knowing the rules and knowing your obligations gets you nothing if you cannot show where your project stands. Here we cover the data lifecycle as a control surface, what a breach actually costs, how to build a governance model that holds, and how emerging technology keeps widening the exposure. You will finish with a way to measure compliance and report it like any other project metric.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 2: Plan and manage project compliance · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 8: Evaluate external business environment changes

This is the part of the course where we stop talking about how you lead and start talking about what you have to lead with. We draw the line the exam cares about between leading a team and resourcing one, then work through the two enablers PMI actually names: defining and planning resources from requirements, and managing and optimizing them once the project is running.

Along the way, we cover the four resource types, the resource management plan, RACI, resource calendars and histograms, the levelling-versus-smoothing distinction the exam loves, and how resourcing works differently on a stable agile team than on a predictive one.

ECO: Process — Task 4: Plan and manage resources

Ten enablers sit behind procurement, which makes it the densest task in the outline. You'll start with the make-or-buy decision and what changes the moment a resource comes from outside. Then you'll walk the procurement lifecycle: plan, solicit, select, administer, close.

You'll get into bid documents, source selection criteria, and contract types, because the exam tests contracts by asking who carries the risk. You'll also cover negotiation strategy and BATNA, supplier performance, and how adaptive teams contract when the scope isn't fixed.

ECO: Process — Task 5: Plan and manage procurement

This one is about the money. You'll get the four words the exam assumes you know: estimate, budget, cost baseline, funding limit. Then you'll build a budget from the bottom up and get the two reserves absolutely clean, because the exam tests that split relentlessly.

After that: spend tracking, earned value, financial reporting and governance, anticipating what's coming, and how funding works on an adaptive project.

ECO: Process — Task 6: Plan and manage finance

You'll start with the two distinctions the exam loves: quality versus grade, and quality assurance versus quality control. From there, you'll gather quality requirements, plan your processes and tools, and actually run the quality management plan. You'll get cost of quality in full, because that's the most quantified idea in the task.

You'll also cover regulatory compliance and sustainability, which the 2026 outline folds in right here. Then ongoing reviews, continuous improvement, and how agile builds quality in through the definition of done instead of inspecting it in at the end.

ECO: Process — Task 7: Plan and optimize quality of products/deliverables · Supporting: Business Environment — Task 2: Plan and manage project compliance

Eight enablers sit behind evaluating project status, and four of them are about artifacts. That tells you how much PMI cares about the project's information system, not just its numbers. You'll work through designing metrics, reconciling them, tailoring and maintaining artifacts, keeping them reachable, assessing progress honestly, and reporting status to different audiences.

Along the way: leading versus lagging indicators, vanity metrics, and the agile radiators — burndown, burnup, velocity and cumulative flow — and what each one is actually for.

ECO: Process — Task 9: Evaluate project status · Supporting: People — Task 8: Plan and manage communication

The first thing we do is separate this from organizational change, because change control and organizational change are two completely different things that share a word. Then we walk the change control process end to end: request, log, analyze impact across every constraint, decide at the right authority, communicate the decision either way, implement, and update every document the change touches.

We cover the change control board, integrated change control and why the word integrated is the whole point, the defect that is undocumented scope creep, and how change control works on an adaptive project where change is expected by design.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 3: Manage and control changes

Closure is the task most projects perform worst at, because by the time it arrives, everyone is already on the next thing. We cover obtaining formal stakeholder approval of completion and why formal matters, determining closure criteria (and determining them at the start, not the end), validating readiness for transition to operations or the next phase and the concluding activities PMI names explicitly: final lessons learned, retrospectives, procurement closure, financial closure and releasing resources.

We also cover closing a cancelled project, phase closure in a predictive lifecycle, and what closure looks like when you release continuously.

ECO: Process — Task 10: Manage project closure

Three enablers close this section: utilize lessons learned, help ensure continuous improvement processes are updated, and update organizational process assets. We separate the lessons learned register from the lessons learned repository, walk the four-step loop that makes learning actually change behaviour, and diagnose the four reasons lessons learned usually fail.

We cover OPAs in both flavours, tacit versus explicit knowledge and communities of practice, retrospectives as the highest-frequency improvement mechanism in project management, and then close the section by pulling all eight tasks back together.

ECO: Business Environment — Task 6: Continuous improvement · Supporting: People — Task 7: Help ensure knowledge transfer