Arnab Bhattacharjee works as a Transformation Manager at Concentrix, a global customer experience services and technologies company.
He has been aiming for PMP certification for some time now and finally earlier this year he decided to give it a go with all seriousness. “With a student mindset”, as he says. 🙂
I caught up with him on a chat and asked Arnab about his approaches, strategies, and challenges, so you can take some of those and incorporate in your own PMP exam preparation.
Are you preparing for the PMP exam?
With multiple projects to manage across 2 timezones, a 3-year-old kid at home, falling sick the week before the exam, completing it with 30 minutes to go, and getting Above Target in all 3 domains – this is ONE interview you don’t want to miss! 🙂
If you are in a hurry, please go ahead and watch this video interview.
And before that, consider taking a moment to share this page to help people struggling with their PMP exam preparation.
Congratulations once again on your PMP, Arnab. That’s an awesome achievement, knowing how hard it can be, right?
In today’s short discussion, we’ll talk about your approach, strategies, and insights into preparing for this exam so that people who are in the process of preparing for the PMP exam can try out some of your advice.
So, the first question I have is when it comes to project management certification exams, there are so many, right? So…
What made you go for PMP in particular?
Well yeah. So before I started with PMP preparation, it was to enhance my project management skills and to gain recognition as a certified professional in this field.
I did consider PRINCE and some other certifications. But overall, when I consider PMP, being a globally recognized certification it was definitely the one matching with my industry requirements. So that’s the reason I went after PMP.
Do you want my PMP launch course? ($27 value, get for free today)
Can you tell us a little bit about what you work on?
I mostly handle projects in the US healthcare industry.
Where there are complex projects in terms of requirements, in terms of timelines, and most essentially communication. So when you are exploring something unknown and trying to deliver benefits to the client or the end customer. So that’s the kind of project I mostly do.
And PMP was helping in terms of knowing the right tools, which one to use when to communicate better, and about the artifacts.
You used a pretty good phrase there, “working with the unknowns”. That’s probably the best summary of the role of a project manager, right?
So many unknowns and trying to wear multiple hats. And trying to balance the resources and needs, while still trying to achieve project objectives. Correct.
So before taking up PMP, did you have any specific expectations, and after you passed it, how have those expectations turned out?
Before taking the exam, it was just like it was an approach to gaining knowledge and knowing the process, tools, and the right methods.
Now after knowing those, and clearing the exam, I do feel that PMP is helping me. Giving a structured approach to managing the projects. It’s giving me a ton of confidence and the credibility to manage complex projects now.
So those are coming into my kit. So no more simple ones. I’ve begun to take up complex ones, challenging ones.
I mean, at least knowing the structure of, you know, what are the things, what are the checks and balances to be in place when you know, taking up a project. Sometimes you’re also thrown into a project that is underway for whatever reasons, you know, the project manager left or whatever.
And then at that point of being able to know where things are in terms of gauging the health of the projects, that kind of knowledge is very valuable, isn’t it?
And that comes only when you do some kind of comprehensive certification exam like PMP.
And look at each of the 10 knowledge areas that we talk about. Okay, how are we doing on the resources part? How are we doing on the schedule part? How are we doing on the risk part? I mean, being able to know which top, which sort of project artifacts to look for is a quick way of figuring out how the project is doing. [continue reading…]