E015 Project Management is listed under banner number ITEC 5322 and is worth 4 competency units. It covers essential project management concepts and the project manager's role, and asks you to develop a project management plan across all standardized phases, with certification-associate content areas in view. E015 is the current entry; the legacy code with the same title is C783 under banner ITEC 5320, and your Degree Plan decides which one you complete.
The plan is the deliverable, and the role is the subject
What distinguishes this course from a general management course is the emphasis on the project manager's role: a position with a great deal of accountability and, in most organizations, limited direct authority. Almost everything a project manager achieves happens through influence, clarity and the disciplined use of documents that make commitments visible. Reading the course through that lens explains why so much of it is about writing things down.
The phases give the plan its structure, and the useful insight is that each phase produces something the next one needs. Initiation produces authority to proceed. Planning produces the baseline against which everything is later measured. Execution produces the deliverables and consumes the plan. Monitoring compares reality to baseline and generates decisions. Closing produces acceptance, handover and the record of what was learned.
Baselines are the concept students most often hold loosely. A baseline is the approved version of scope, schedule and cost against which performance is measured, and it changes only through the change process. Without a baseline there is no meaningful reporting, because there is nothing to compare progress against, and this is why monitoring aspects frequently depend on planning aspects having done their job.
Communication planning deserves genuine attention. Who needs to know what, how often, in what format and through what channel is a plannable thing, and projects that fail on communication rarely failed for lack of information. They failed because the right information reached the wrong person too late, in a format they did not read.
Competent or Not Competent is the whole scale. There are no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average, and 4 competency units describes how much of a flat-priced six month term this course occupies.
Turning aspects into a complete plan
If your version of E015 uses a performance assessment, the aspects usually map onto plan components across the phases. WGU requires a score of 2 in each aspect for a task to pass and judges each aspect alone, so a comprehensive schedule will not carry an unaddressed communication or closure aspect.
Budget before drafting. Take a rubric with eleven scored aspects and a target near 3,300 words. Reserve 190 words for the project context and 140 for the close, leaving 2,970 across eleven aspects, or 270 each. Weight by demand: four aspects requiring justification take 390 each, which is 1,560; the seven remaining aspects, covering plan components, take 201 each, which is 1,407. Together that is 2,967.
Write the plan components in dependency order regardless of rubric order: charter, then scope, then breakdown, then schedule, then cost, then risk, then communication, then change. Each of those genuinely needs the one before it, and drafting out of order produces documents where the schedule contains work the scope never authorised.
Reserve budget for the monitoring section, which students consistently underweight. Naming the specific measures, their reporting frequency, the variance threshold that triggers action and who receives the report converts monitoring from a phase name into a working mechanism.
Shape for a project management plan
E015 deliverables are usually complete plans. These proportions fit that document.
| Section | Content | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Initiation | Business case, objective, sponsor, high-level requirements and the authority to proceed. | 11 percent |
| Scope baseline | Deliverables, breakdown structure, acceptance criteria and exclusions. | 15 percent |
| Schedule baseline | Activities, dependencies, durations, critical path and milestone dates. | 16 percent |
| Cost and resources | Estimates with basis, resource assignments and availability assumptions. | 14 percent |
| Risk plan | Register with response, owner and trigger, plus how new risks enter it. | 14 percent |
| Communication plan | Audience, content, frequency, format and channel for each stakeholder group. | 13 percent |
| Monitoring and closure | Measures, thresholds, change control, acceptance and lessons capture. | 17 percent |
Sourcing a plan at graduate level
Terminology, process definitions and technique descriptions belong to the standard your course materials use, cited by edition. Precision matters because terms like deliverable, milestone and activity have defined meanings that are used loosely in everyday speech, and loose usage in a graduate plan is visible immediately.
Every estimate needs a stated method. Whether you compared to a similar past effort, multiplied a rate by a quantity, or combined optimistic, likely and pessimistic values, naming the technique is what turns a number into a defensible position. Where uncertainty is high, say so and give a range rather than false precision.
Scenario constraints should appear throughout. A fixed regulatory deadline, a supplier lead time, a key person who is unavailable for a month or a sponsor with a stated budget ceiling all shape the plan, and referencing them by name is what stops the document from reading as a filled-in template.
Where you cite general research about project outcomes, give the year and the population. These figures circulate widely without attribution, and a properly sourced one is worth more than three familiar but untraceable statistics.
Keep to the citation style the task requires and attach every source to the sentence that depends on it.
Competent plans and returned ones
Competent submissions establish baselines, use terminology precisely, assign owners in every register, plan communication as deliberately as schedule, and define what monitoring would actually measure and when it would trigger action.
Returns follow four shapes. There is no baseline, so the monitoring section has nothing to compare against. Communication planning is one paragraph about weekly meetings. Estimates appear without method. Or closure is treated as the project simply ending, with no acceptance criteria or lessons capture.
Assumptions and constraints deserve their own visible list, because they are the hidden foundation of every estimate in the plan. An assumption is something you have taken to be true without confirming it; a constraint is a limit you have been given. Writing both down does two things: it protects the plan when an assumption turns out to be wrong, and it shows the evaluator which parts of your reasoning depend on information you did not have. Plans without this list tend to contain confident numbers that nobody could reproduce.
One further distinction is worth making explicit in the risk section. A risk is an uncertain event that may or may not happen; an issue is something that already has. Plans that mix them produce a register full of problems requiring action now, filed alongside contingencies for events that may never occur, and neither gets handled properly. Keeping them separate, with different handling for each, is a small discipline that reads as professional.
A useful check before submitting: pick three deliverables from your scope and confirm each one appears in the breakdown structure, the schedule and the acceptance criteria. Any deliverable missing from one of those three has broken the chain that makes the plan coherent.
WGU attaches no grade penalty to a revised and resubmitted performance assessment, so submit as soon as every aspect has a real answer, since an early submission leaves room for a revision cycle. If your section also carries an objective assessment, WGU objective assessments are proctored and our boundary is fixed: preparation only, with process drills, terminology practice and a candid read on your preassessment result. We never sit an exam, stay out of the room entirely, and your portal login is never something we touch.
Plan complete but not coherent?
Send the E015 rubric and scenario. We build the components in dependency order and check the chain from scope to acceptance, with word targets.
Eight mistakes that cost time in E015
- Confusing the two codes. E015 is ITEC 5322 and C783 is ITEC 5320. Same title, different Degree Plan entries.
- No baseline. Monitoring compares reality to an approved version. Without one, reporting means nothing.
- Drafting out of dependency order. Charter, scope, breakdown, schedule, cost. Skipping ahead produces plans that contradict themselves.
- Communication as meetings. Plan audience, content, frequency, format and channel for each group.
- Loose terminology. Deliverable, milestone and activity are defined terms. Use them exactly.
- Estimates without method. Name the technique and the inputs, and give a range where uncertainty is real.
- Thin monitoring. Measures, frequency, variance thresholds and recipients turn a phase name into a mechanism.
- Closure as stopping. Acceptance criteria, handover and lessons capture are the deliverables of the final phase.
Three questions students ask about E015
How does E015 relate to C783?
Is this the same as the undergraduate project management course?
What software should I use for the schedule?
Where E015 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 3 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.