2.2. Project Management Planning
Once you know what you're building and why, the next question is how the work gets organized on paper. Without a shared set of planning documents, a team ends up re-deriving the same decisions repeatedly, or worse, making them inconsistently across people. Think of each planning document like a labeled drawer in a filing cabinet — each one answers exactly one recurring question, and knowing which drawer to open is more testable than memorizing what's inside it. This section covers the documents and artifacts associate-level team members are expected to recognize by purpose — not draft from scratch, but know when each one is the right tool, and where it lives in the plan; the ⚠️ Exam Traps below cover the two pairs of documents candidates confuse most often.
The two subsections that follow trace one continuous thread rather than two separate topics. Planning (2.2.1) sets the baselines — cost, schedule, quality, and risk — that the rest of the project gets measured against. Registers and closure (2.2.2) pick up from there: tracking deviations from those baselines as the project runs, and confirming at the end that the baselines were actually met. A risk logged during planning matters precisely because it's still the record consulted at closure; skip the connection and each artifact becomes a standalone checkbox instead of part of one accountable story.
