Well PMZilla and members, I joined the ranks of several others in PMI and passed my PMP on the 8th of Dec. I owe it to the several people who assisted, advised, helped and supported me in this effort.  My quest started in Sep. 2013 when I took a one week workshop that was arranged by my company on a condition that I must take the exam within three months. I attended the workshop without prior knowledge on PMP and its material. And that was a mistake. At the end of the session I scored 50% in an internal test that the facilitator made us take. I realized that I was probably the only person who had come to the workshop unprepared. The best thing I gained was the PMBoK, 200 ‘Simplilearn’ Q&As, and PMBOK Guide questions by Frank Anbari, a book with 205 Q&As. So there, a lesson learnt. My project for getting the PMP certification has come to an end (like the several other projects that I had completed in  my professional career so far) and I feel that I should have done (taken the PMP) this a long time back. Anyway time only allowed me now I guess.

Anyway, in the past 2.5 months, I spent about 1.5 months studying with concentration in the last three weeks. I started with PM Central for the free questions. I tried several other sites for Q & A including PMZilla, PMforsure, MyPMPExamprep, PMPbank (Google), Oliver Lehmann just to name a few. The easiest that I felt were PM central and PMBank. Oliver Lehmann was tough and I feel that about 10% - 15% of the questions had some similarity to it. The same is true for the abovementioned others. I learned one think here, look for the quality of the questions, the best quality of the questions that I used was (in my opinion) was in PM Central, their answers are also spot on with explanations provided along with the answer. I had prepared Tuckmann ladder, reverse calculation on number of stakeholders from given comm. channels, earned value, had almost 20 tough questions on risk (that made me think in the beginning I will flunk) types of costs, fixed-variable, McGregor’s theories, PTA, confusing ones on quality, that were hard to comprehend, the exam covered basically the whole of PMBoK, no use on giving examples. My advice prepare properly.

I cannot forget Rita, that has large collection of Q &As, lots of them are good and lots of them are tougher than PMI’s. It will be wrong to say Rita is a must, I read it completely and three times, it is a very good book and carefully prepared, broaden the knowledge on PM processes and gives very helpful tips on how to pass the exam no doubt.

I studied PMBoK may be three times and revised few chapters several times. I hated ITTOs, so I never bothered with memorizing those. This was my weakest point. I cleared my concepts well by Rita on the processes. In the last 6 days, I studied Rita and PMBoK together. I felt that ripping out the chapters from PMBoK and stapling together made it easy for studying while lying in bed. The book was too heavy and clumsy to hold open. I expanded from the PMP formulas that I found on PMZilla, did not study Raga notes as I had covered more ground. In the end the notes became something that made me revise every day. I used to rewrite the 47 processes almost every day and the formulas as well.

My scores varied and improved from 68% to 82% in all of the above. I felt that I will knock’em all dead on the day of judgment. Well, it was on the 8^th of Dec. I did not ‘knowledge dump’ other that the 8 – 9 formulae on variance analysis (PV, EV etc). I did not feel writing (or I accidently started the test early, not sure) the hundreds of things such as the 47 processes table, the PTA or the LS and the ES etc. that I practiced writing every day. Those that I wrote did not come in handy as I had them in my head anyway.

In PMzilla, someone wrote that the first few questions for them were easy and morale booster, it was quite the opposite here, as I had to mark the first few for review that started with complex network diagrams asking for lags and leads, and other twisted tricky questions. I continued on and was able to answer the first 25 in about 30 minutes. Hard part was the distraction from the clicking noise by test takers although I was wearing ear plugs. There were moments where I lost concentration and read a whole question without really reading it. I was able to recover from this feeling only to find out that I had spent a whole minute on a question where the answer was on my fingertips.

Anyway, I had 20 minutes remaining to review the questions and I was only able to review about half of them. During the review time was over and then came the survey that I quickly completed. I could swear hearing my heart beat and it was all over. I was proficient in some of the mock tests but I feel the test was really tough, lots of questions that even after preparation could not be answered easily, very, very tricky. And thanks to the several ‘easy’ ones that are similar to Exam Central’s. Anyway, I have cleared it and no regrets of not been able to this, that and the other. I had become sick of studies and so was everybody else, like my cat that had started to shred my notes in frustration recently apart from sitting on top of those to get noticed.

I appreciate the support of my wife, children and several others including PMZilla and it’s large number of forum members who gave me courage and advice.

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