AACE PSP study guide
AACE PSP · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Planning and Scheduling Professional (PSP) is one of the professional certifications offered by AACE International, listed on the association's site alongside the CCP, CEP, EVP and PRMP credentials. It is aimed at practitioners who build, maintain and interpret project schedules - planners, schedulers and project-controls staff who need to demonstrate competence across the full schedule life cycle rather than in a single technique. Preparation should be organized around the four knowledge areas the exam is built on: Project Planning, Scheduling, Schedule Maintenance and Control, and Schedule Analysis and Reporting, each weighted at 25 percent of the exam. A sensible study path is to work through them in that order, because planning outputs feed schedule development, which in turn feeds maintenance, control and analysis. Topics on this exam: Project Planning, Scheduling, Schedule Maintenance and Control, and Schedule Analysis and Reporting. The AACE PSP study guide has 4 sections and about 1,156 words.
01Project Planning Fundamentals
Planning converts scope into an executable, measurable baseline. Know the sequence: scope statement → work breakdown structure (WBS) → activity definition → logic → estimate → schedule. The WBS is deliverable-oriented and decomposes to work packages; activities belong to work packages, not to the WBS itself. Understand the planning products a scheduler produces: activity list, activity attributes, milestone list, network logic, resource and cost loading, and the schedule baseline.
307 words, about 2 min02Scheduling and Network Logic
Understand the precedence diagramming method (PDM): activities as nodes, relationships as arrows. Know finish-to-start (FS), start-to-start (SS), finish-to-finish (FF), and start-to-finish (SF), and how lags modify each. Activity-on-arrow (ADM) uses dummy activities to preserve logic; know why dummies exist (unique activity identification and logic continuity). Master the arithmetic.
300 words, about 2 min03Schedule Maintenance and Control
Control requires a stable baseline against which performance is measured. Know the update cycle: collect progress (actual start/finish, remaining duration, percent complete), apply a data date (status date), recalculate, and compare. The data date is the boundary between actuals and forecast; no work should be reported after it. progress override is a key distinction: retained logic preserves original sequencing for incomplete work, while progress override allows out-of-sequence work to proceed without preserving all logic.
269 words, about 1 min04Schedule Analysis and Reporting
Reporting begins with analysis. Know schedule variance analysis, critical path analysis, float analysis, and earned schedule. Earned schedule uses ES = time at which PV equals EV; SV(t) = ES − AT; SPI(t) = ES ÷ AT. Unlike SPI, SPI(t) is time-based and does not drift toward 1.0 at completion.
280 words, about 1 min