I thought I would share my experience with preparing for and taking the PMP Exam which I passed last week.

Previous Experience:  I've done project management for years, but primarily in functional organizations which do not adhere to most PMBOK practices.  Before starting my PMP prep I have had two formal courses on Project Management over the last 10 years so many of the concepts were not new to me when I started my effort. 

How long did it take to prepare for the exam?  It took me 10 weeks to get through the PMP certification process.  I signed up for an online boot camp to complete my 35 contact hours on 3/17 and sat for the exam on May 24th.  I was probably ready to sit for the exam 3 weeks before my actual test date based on my practice exam scores.  The last three weeks was about solidifying my knowledge and gaining confidence in the material.

Getting 35 Contact Hours:  The first thing I did to prepare for the exam was to sign up for a boot camp to close out my contact hour requirements.  I looked at a number of online PMP Boot Camps.  I concentrated on three offers for under $100. Simplilearn, PM PrepCast and PMP Prep Kit.    I ultimately decided on the PMP Prep Kit because I liked the format and Joseph Phillips delivery style.  At $55 it covers a lot of material and is a great value. It's hard to criticize something that delivers so much material for so little money, but here is some constructive feedback.  First, the PMP Prep Kit is not a PMI REP approved which apparently streamlines the approval of your contract hours if you are audited.  I wasn't audited, but there is a certain peace of mind that comes from that REP certification even if it isn't strictly required to get credit for the training.  That said Joseph has published books on this subject so I felt comfortable that the material would be solid.  It was.  There were a few minor typos/inconsistencies in the material and the modules on quality could have been better.  The course didn't cover 100% of the material in a PMBOK, but it covered most of it.  All in all it was a good experience and a great value, but it was not sufficient, in my opinion, to prepare for the exam.

Books: The second thing I did to prepare for the exam was to study a number of PMP exam books.   I purchased three books.  The Head First PMP, Kim Heldaman's book and the PMBOK.  I chose the first two due to good reviews and the fact I could buy them used at a discouted price.  Here is my evaluation of each.

Head First PMP - I love the approach here, but the book is not up to date with the latest version of the PMBOK so I suggest you steer away from it.  To be fair, many of the topics it covers are still relevant and it does an EXCELLENT job of presenting the material in an approachable manner.  The problem is that you need to decipher what's no longer relevant from what is.  For this reason I reluctantly stopped using it after several chapters.

Heldaman's Book - After giving up on the Head First book I moved on to Kim's book.  She covers all of the material in the PMBOK and uses case studies and real life examples to help you retrain the knowledge. The self-assessment quiz and the quizzes at the end of chapters are excellent and really test your knowledge.  The book also comes with a CD that has two 70+ question tests and the exams/quizzes from the book.  My assessment is that Kim had the best crafted questions that I encountered in my entire test preparation process.  The two 70+ question exams really pushed my knowledge. I used all of the exam  time to get through the questions and scored in the 70-75% range. Unlike some other tough exam questions that required the memorization of some obscure refrence in the PMBOK...Kim's question really tested your comprehension.  One criticisms I've seen of Kim's book is that it breaks up the knowledge areas and covers the material chronologically in the way a project would proceed in real life.  I actually found the approach to be more intuitive, but it does make it difficult to tie the content back to the PMBOK which is organized by knowledge areas. Anyway...great resource and highly recommended.

PMBOK - After completing Kim's book I moved on to the PMBOK.  I've read a lot of crtitisim about the PMBOK being hard to read, boring, dry...but that wasn't my experience.  It obviously doesn't have case studies or real life examples like you will find in the Heldman and Head First books, but I found it very informative.  It was easy to read, and helpful to see the actual phrasing used in the PMBOK unfiltered by an author who despite there best intention can leave out some of the meaning and context.  I ultimately spent more time with this than the other books.  I went through everything once and did a second pass on the knowledge areas that I had the most trouble with in the practice exams.  I have to commend the PMI organization on its organization and content.

Practice Exams: A key component of preparing to sit for your PMP exam is taking practice exams.  Several "experts" on the exam have suggested that you should answer thousands of questions in preparation for the real exam.  I estimate that I answered just over a thousand questions in my preparation efforts.  I was nervous about using "free" question due to the possibility that the answers could be wrong.  So I looked at a number of fee based services.  I took my first exam after completing the my PMP boot camp to get a feel for focus areas, but  I didn't focus on the exams until I had completed Heldman's book and did one pass through the PMBOK guide.

Exam Central: http://www.examcentral.net/pmp/pmp-exam-questions - This was the only "for free" service I used to any extent and I was impressed with the quality of the offering given that it is free. I took one full length exam and found the questions easier than some of the other sources, but if you have a tight budget this would be a great resource for questions. 

PM Study: http://www.pmstudy.com/ - These tests are frequently sighted as the most similar to the actual exam.   I took two of the four test offered by this vendor (the first being free).  It took me roughly the same amount of time to complete these exams as it did to complete the real exam (a little over three hours).  I scored 82 on the first exam and 84 on the second exam.  From the posts I've read if you were scoring in the low eighties on this exam you were probably ready for the real exam.  Based on my experience that was correct.  I highly recommend this service.  I would have taken the final two exams, but I had to pull in my test date due to a work travel commitment that came up - and frankly - by the time I was approaching the exam  I couldn't muster the energy to sit through another 3 hour practice exam. 

PM Exam Simulator: http://www.pm-exam-simulator.com/ - I have mixed opinions on this offering.  To borrow from the PMBOK it was high grade and low quality.  First the good.  There are 1800  questions.  The software design is excellent. It allows you to create custom exams on specific knowledge areas.  It has 9 full length exams.  It does an excellent job of providing explanations of the correct answer including references to the source material in the PMBOK.  It does a great job of analyzing the results of your exam and allows you to store a number of the exams so you can go back and review them.  The problem with the offering is that I found the wording of the questions to be sub-par.  They appeared to be written by people who spoke English as a second language.  When I took the fist full length exam I found over 20 glaring grammatical issues (I'm not including minor problems I found in this number).  As you can tell from this overview I'm not an English major and grammar is not something I typically get hung up on, but this issue ultimately led me to request a refund to this service - which was promptly provided.  I hope they work through the grammatical problems as otherwise this was a tremendous offer.

PM Perfect: http://www.pmperfect.com/ - When the PM Exam Simulator didn't work out I ended up trying the PM Perfect Service.  In general the PM Exam Simulator is a better offer , but PM Perfect's questions are well written grammatically.  The PM Perfect offer does provide the ability to generate custom exams based on the different knowledge areas and provides scoring history and diagnostics.  It also has a pre-designed list of exams that are 10 and 50 questions in length that you use to work through the entire catalog of questions.  I found that these exams started out easy and got progressively harder.  At first I was scoring 90+ and completing the exams in very little time.  Towards the end the exams were harder, took longer to complete and I had a few scores in the seventies.  My overall assessment was that this service was good, and definitely helped me prepare for the real exam. 

Heldaman's Book - just a reminder that I also used the questions from Heldaman's book and felt these were the best I encountered.

ITTOs: Many of the people that pass the exam say they did not memorize the ITTOs.  I did.   I do NOT want to advance the myth that you need to memorize  ITTOs to pass the PMP exam.  I started to memorize ITTOs initially because it helped me  put a framework in place to understand the larger body of knowledge.  Ultimately, I stuck with it because it was a challenge and it definitely helped me with some of the exam questions.  Bottom line - I'm not encouraging you to memorize the ITTOs. It requires a lot of work. If you want to memorize the ITTOs here was my experience.

 I started by memorizing the phases, knowledge areas and processes.  I did this over a number of sessions one weekend.  It was not that hard.  Once I had the processes down I started on the ITTOs.  My initial approach was to memorize these by knowledge area.  Over a couple of days I was able to memorize all of the ITTOs for the Integration and Scope knowledge areas.  When I moved on to the Schedule area I hit a wall.  Not only was it harder for me to memorize the new schedule ITTOs, I discovered that I could no longer remember all of the ITTOs from the  processes I'd already memorized.  At this point I nearly took other people's advise and just stopped trying to memorize the ITTOs.  That would have probably been the smart approach, but I'm stubborn so I stuck with it and tried new techniques.

 The approach that ultimatly worked for me was to memorize the ITTOs by phase.  This approach was more intuitive to me because it followed a traditional project cylce.  I also used "narratives" to help with my memorization.  For example, I'd do some thing like this for Define Activities - "At this point in the project I've created my scope statement and broken it down to deliverables in the Create WBS process.  Now I need to define the actual activities that need to be performed to complete the project.  To do this I need the Scope Baseline....."  This approach helped me a lot. It also forced me to research each ITTO so I understood how it fit into the process.  The next thing I did was to reduce the pace of memorization and dedicate time to retaining the material I'd already memorized.  This meant memorizing one or two processes each day and then spending the rest of the time reviewing the areas I'd already memorized.  At first the review time wasn't too bad, but as you add more processes it get's to the point where you can't review everything each day.  To address this I created a schedule for what new material I would cover each day and  what material I would review. Once I had covered all of the processes I found that I still needed to keep do regular reviews to retain the knowledge.  At my best I could recite from memory almost all of the ITTOs (I'd miss probably 10-15 items).  There is a lot of effort that goes into memorization, but the up side is that I never missed a question on any practice exam that had to do with ITTOs or the order of processes.

The Actual Exam: I found that the actual exam to be easier that I thought it would be.  Some of the exams I took (PM Study and Heldman's Questions) had a lot of extraneous material that made it hard to get to the real question.  This approach often required me to read the question multiple times before I could start reviewing the answer options.    The questions on the real exam were more straight forward.  In the practice exams I also encountered a lot of questions that required you to memorize obscure details from the PMBOK (for example needing to know one of the sited examples of Enterprise Environmental Factors in the PMBOK).  I didn't find that to be the case on the actual exam.  I think if you can score 80+ on the PM Study exam you should be ready for the real exam.

Summary: preparing for the exam required a major commitment of time.  While I did have to sacrifice a lot of my free time over the ~10 weeks of preparation I was able to do this while working a full time job and participating in a regular calendar of  family activities (baseball/softball games, concerts...etc).  There is nothing in this material that I found to be hard to understand.  The complexity comes from the breadth of material covered and your ability to understand how it all relates.  I can definitely tell you that my project management skills have improved due to my efforts here, and beyond the benefits of the certification itself....that made the time well spent.

Good luck!