.

No, I didn’t get this fortune strip in the cookie. Nevertheless, my exam results made me happy. 🙂

Sharing my exam experience has been overdue and here it is. As you can imagine many of PMP concepts can be applied for this ‘project’ of taking PMP exam – such as planning, risk management, costing and budgeting. I am also going to share few tips that can save you time, energy and heartburn during the time leading up to your exam.

Read about the 10-min PMP preparation tip here.

This became quite a looong post so I am splitting into two. In this one I will share my lessons about preparing for the big day, due diligence needed, and few tips. In the next post I shall share my exam brain-dump.

So let’s dive right in.

PMI Membership

Taking membership from Project Management Institute is the first thing to do the moment you decide to take up PMP exam. Why?

Taking PMI membership has three distinct advantages –

1. You get your free, legal copy of latest PMBOK guide
2. You start becoming serious about the exam because now you have made a financial investment
3. You get a discount on the examination fee, and your overall cost of owning PMP certificate is reduced

The PMP beginner’s guide explains nuances of getting PMI membership, and more. You can refer to the guide here.

Preparation

The suggested way by my seniors in the organization was to buy one of the well-known PMP books and then read PMBOK and that book one after the other at least 4-5 times, till I understood everything in it. This meant spending LOT of time reading, and re-reading even if I didn’t get much in initial rounds.

[continue reading…]

Happy New Year – 2014!

We announced a new contest in the month of December-2013, to all PMESN Community members on Facebook. The contest is pretty simple – I post a sample PMP question every day and all you have to do is answer it correctly. At the end of the month, I will announce the winner of the contest for the month.

And for December 2013, the winner is Asmara Rahat! She got 11 of the answers right!

Congratulations, Asmara Rahat!

Head over to Facebook and Like the PMESN community page to receive your PMP sample question every day. Answer them correct and be the winner next time!

Cheers,
Shiv

In the previous post I shared tips to get most out of your PMBOK book with just 10mins of effort every day.

People have individual study styles and yours may differ from what worked for me. However, in this post I am going to share the approach I have found most effective to get most out of PMBOK study, which I hope will give you a pointer or two to help in your PMP preparation.

First and most important, study with a mindset that you are going to ace the exam. This may sound clichéd but it really helps. When we hold this mindset our brain becomes surprisingly alert, and it somehow knows what to look for and what to remember. This is of supreme importance.

Table Of Contents

Go through TOC and understand the structure in which information is presented. You would have noticed that PMBOK first explains the basic concepts and then goes on to explain the individual knowledge areas. This gives us 50000 ft high view. That is why all the lessons and menu structure on PMExamSmartNotes.com are aligned with this structure.

Know the Process Groups and Knowledge Area names

You learned how to do this effortlessly in the previous post, linked here.

The Most Important Table of PMBOK

There is one single-most table one must remember in PMBOK. This is the table on page 61: “Table 3-1. Project Management Process Groups and Knowledge Area Mapping”. Know this like back of your hand.

If you find this hard to remember, not to worry, there is an easier way to do this. This is how you do it. [continue reading…]

How comfortable do you feel about your understanding of PMBOK so far?

For a long time I struggled to get a ‘hang’ of PMBOK. I knew that irrespective of which other study resource(s) I used I must go through PMBOK few times. But none of those resources really taught me how to get a hold on PMBOK’s contents. In this two part post series I will share my key findings (I’d like to call Ninja Tips 🙂 ) that have helped me do just that.

It is absolutely critical that you remember the names of all knowledge areas, process groups and processes and know which KA and PG each of the processes fall in. This is so important that I am going to repeat it –

It is absolutely critical that you remember the names of all knowledge areas, process groups and processes and know which KA and PG each of the processes fall in.

If you are able to recall these at will, you can feel so much more confident about overall PMP study.

The good news is that you can get this understanding within 1-2hrs of overall effort spread over only few days. As little as 10-15min every day is all that you need! Here you go!

[continue reading…]

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As soon as I took the PMI membership I had this question –

Should I go take a one-on-one PMP training session taking off from work, or can I opt for an online course?

I found that the benefits of online option was far greater than former one.

• I could learn from the comfort of my home or office or even learn while commuting
• I could go over the same material any number of times, especially to understand complex concepts
• I could just return the course if I didn’t find it useful, not an option if I took classroom training from one of the institutes around. So my risk on the investment is zero!

It was really the effectiveness and convenience of study, and the fact that I could get 35hrs mandatory exam requirement fulfilled by studying with a schedule I could put around my working hours – that made me opt for online course.

But I didn’t want to take any chances.  None at all.

So I wrote to PMI, asking whether I could take an online course that provides me 35hr project management certificate, that – more importantly – PMI would accept.

Here is the reply I got from PMI –

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