Dear Friends,

I am very happy to inform that with God’s grace I was able to clear PMP with 5 Ps.

It wouldn’t have been possible to accomplish this milestone without the immense support from my wife (for taking care of all household works while I locked myself in study room for 3 hrs during weekdays and 6 hrs during weekends for almost 3 months), family (well wishes), friends (helping me with PMBOK GUIDE and ANDY CROWE book) and Last but not least lots of kind hearted people from this awesome PMZILLA site.

So, it’s my time to give back to the PMZILLA community and here is my long LL.

Background:

I have just enough experience to get by the PMP certification criteria with graduate degree. So I hope my LL will help PMP aspirants of similar grade (oh...Yeah remember the difference between grade and Quality, as I had to apply it to answer at least 2 situational questions on this topicJ).

I consider myself procrastinator and lazy person. So if I can get PMP then anybody with right attitude, preparation can definitely achieve this goal.

Material used:

ANDY CROWE: Best starter to get the basics clear.

RITA 7^th edition: Very useful to understand how to apply the learning while solving the problem.

Rita’s Fastrack: Very close to the exam questions. I primarily used this software to get through on the knowledge areas and Used Pmstudy for mock exam preparation.

PMSTUDY paid mock exam:

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Very useful in finding and analysing the knowledge gaps.

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Closer to the exam difficulty level

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Helps a lot in building the stamina for taking the exam at a stretch for 4 hours and learning the time management during exam.

PMBOK: Used only as reference. Which I think, was not a wise Idea. Thoroughly reading this book would have definitely helped further.

Even though I started preparing during January, I had to stop preparing because of the audit. Then I resumed the study from FEB.

Preparation:

I personally think 3 months of rigours study (3hrs during weekdays and 6-8 hrs during weekend) should be enough for preparing well for this exam.

Read through the ANDY CROWE BOOK in 15 days. For next 15 days I started reading the RITA and used the Andy Crowe book as base to mark down any extra points from Rita in the Andy Crowe book. Then I solved all the end of chapter questions from RITA.

Finally for next 15 days Read through PMBOK as reference with Andy Crowe as base and collected points from PMBOK that weren’t mentioned in Andy Crowe.

Since I don’t have lot of real life experience with project management I decided to build the PMP muscles by reading the specific Knowledge area from Andy Crowe and extra points from RITA and PMBOK and took 50 questions from that knowledge area from PMFASTRACK.

This method helped a lot to clarify the knowledge area gaps. I did this 3 times in 30 days. At the end of this exercise the all questions in the Fastrack were exhausted (Around 2000 questions) and I had got enough courage to face the mock exams.

With only 15 days I bought the PMSTUDY mock test and used them to take full mock test. I took the test on one day and used the next 2 days to thoroughly analyse the gaps by going through the explanation for wrong answers and the questions that took more than 1 minute (PMSTUDY gives this very useful metric in the final analysis for each answered question).

The mock test results were:

PMSTUDY1: 80%

PMSTUDY2: 79.4%

PMSTUDY3: 81%

PMSTUDY4: 84.5%

Finally, with only 2 days remaining I revised the ITTO’s and  Rajesh Nair/Chowdary /Raga /My notes and on the final day took good rest and very less revision.

The exam:

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I was 1 hour early for the exam and at prometric they allowed me to take the exam immediately.

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 The exam is tough but can definitely be aced with enough preparation and mock test practice.

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As soon as you start the exam please do confirm that it is you attending the test. Then there is ample time to go ahead with the brain dump.

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First question was really difficult quality question which threw me off, Answered it to the best of my ability, marked it and moved on.

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First 100 questions were tough and the next 100 were relatively easy.

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More than 15 EVM questions with 1 Present Value question.

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Around 5-8 CPM questions

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Lot of ITTO questions one or two liners.

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Many situational questions from Risk, Quality, Procurement. These questions were 5-6 lines more like Rita.

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Almost all the questions except the math question had a connection to the ITTO to solve the situation. So it was wise on my part to get very good understanding of  the ITTO’s and  learning them by heart (I am not advising to mug up the ITTO as it will be useless to decode and solve the situational questions , if we don’t understand the why, what and how questions for each ITTO. That’s why it would be wise to learn them and then get it by heart for the purpose of faster remembrance during exam.)

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I spotted some questions with some exact definition lines from PMBOK as options (e.g. Salience model, Grade Vs Quality).

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I wasonly able to take 1 quick washroom break for 2 mins and that’s all the time I could spare for break during the exam.

·         Atlast I had only 15 minutes to review but I had marked around 30 questions for review. However since I made sure I marked the questions only after choosing the best answer possible, I didn’t have to worry about reviewing the entire marked question.

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Finally, the exam ended while I was reviewing the 15^th marked question. Then went through the survey real fast. After which it was a moment of great exhilaration and relief when the “CONGRATULATIONS” message appeared. Then I was pleasantly surprised to see 5P’s on the next page.

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Ended the exam, collected the results and left home happy....J.

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I will scan and upload my notes shortly.

Lessons learned:

What worked:

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Trying to keep calm in exam and try to solve the question at hand to the best of my ability and move on.

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Reading the question twice as there were lot of “NOT”,”EXCEPT”, “INACCURATE” type of questions. I did miss 2 of the questions in the first read and caught it during the second read.

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Keeping Pmzilla lessons learnt as my daily dosage of PMP for advice and for motivation.

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Taking PM Study 4 Mock exams and analyzing Gaps for each wrong answer and answers that took more than 1 minute to answer after each Pmstudy mock test.

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Referring to PMBOK glossary on definitions and difference between PMPLAN and PM DOCS.

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Referencing PMBOK for all Knowledge Areas.

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Learning ITTO’s by heart with a keen understanding as why a particular input/tool/output is required and learning the similarities and differences (E.g. EEF is not an input for any of the control process and mostly all control process has Variance analysis as tool )

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Using Rita’s PM FASTRACK for developing PM muscles

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Rajesh Nair /Chowdary notes... Just amazing.

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Ragas 355 points.

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Preparing my own ITTO notes and improving the PMSTUDY process chart with inputs to Risk and procurement knowledge areas.

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Brain Dump from PMSTUDY and improving it with some additions.

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Learning the EAC formula EAC=AC+ [(BAC-EV) / (CPI*SPI)] from PMBOK when schedule is constant. Had to use this for deriving SPI for one of the problems (PV not derivable and BAC,AC, EV given, EAC to be derive from given details and question was to find SPI). This formula is neither given in Andy Crowe book nor in Rita’s book. So learn to apply this formula.

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Learning the PV formula. Contrary to what Andy crowe and Rita’s book claims that calculating PV is not required, I got a math question for calculating PV.

What could have done better (Or not worked very well):

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Learning to solve math problems faster (with 2 mins at least). I had almost 25 math questions and each took at least 3-5 minutes.

·        I could Have read the PMBOK thoroughly once more than just using it for reference.

        Taking the entire final mock exam in the last stretch. If I had taken the pmstudy1 free test at least 1 month before the exam then I would have decided to read through the PMBOK thoroughly instead of using it just as reference.

Sorry, I wanted to share all my learned experience with PMP aspirants, so My LL became long. Hopefully this LL will help some PMP aspirants appearing for PMP exam soon.

I will try my level best to clarify anyone who needs any clarifications on PMP preparation.

Regards

 

RAAJ PMP (Finally I can have those 3 coveted letters behind my nameJ).