Hello Everyone

 

When I first heard about PMP was back in the year 2007 when I was testing the waters of project management for the first time and taking the Project Management Fundamentals course. Ever since then it has always been my ever elusive goal (always seemed to find a good reason on not to do it .. and to be frank if I knew what I was getting myself into this time, I would have probably postponed it to next year…. again J ). My best reason used to be that I don’t have enough PM experience just yet … but when everything was written and summed up last month, I had 6500 hours of pure PM experience + 3000 or so more eligible of coordinating project activities (this one I didn’t even bother putting into my application)

 

I imagined something to the effect that I would read the PMBOK in a week or so during my lunch breaks because I kinda already knew the basics from PM fundamentals and practice, do few tests the second week and voila, based on my 5 year experience as a PM I would get the certification without much fuss or effort… In fact, I was thinking that my experience alone would probably be enough to barely pass even without any study… How wrong I was… but you all know that J

 

Fast forward June 2012, after countless postponing, a PM colleague had just failed his attempt. Hearing that he prepared for 3 months, did thousands of questions and STILL failed was a rude wake up call and made me realize that this PMP business may not be such a walk in the park after all even if you got the experience under your belt (which he did)..  and that I may have to actually work real hard to get this one. Now .. working real hard.. not really my kinda thing … I prefer efficiency over effort J … But for the PMP , it was only through both combined that I was able to succeed.

 

When I started my preparation I didn’t want to just barely pass, I wanted to really challenge myself and prepare in the most 110% way I possibly can (I was naïve to think that with enough preparation I can get 90%+ in mocks comfortably, go to the exam completely confident and be completely sure that I will pass). To be honest I was at a point in my life when I felt like I had nothing smarter to do anyway but work and study for 39 days straight… and I did just that. 39 days of pure project management , work as PM during the day, study PM during the night and weekends J .. with only about 4 days of break. I figured since I am doing PM for a living for 5 years now and will continue for a lot longer… I might as well master this theory ( even if I don’t agree too much with it)

 

My application even got audited… so I really feel like I got the full PMP Experience Deluxe edition with no holds barred J

 

Well , I am happy to say that I succeeded and I had just passed my PMP today, with 4 Proficient and 1 MP in Closing. I invested a total of 200 hours (tracked my activities per hour and it was a cool coincidence that with the last 2 hours in the bus I hit 200 J ) and went through a total of 3500 questions (again detailed statistics including end chapter questions) before sitting for the exam, during a 39 day period.

 

I do really feel that this was the minimum I needed to do in order to pass the exam ‘comfortably’ at this level (you have to understand that I was not sure I had passed until I saw the screen… with PMP its like poker, you just never know. Especially from question 30 until 90 I hit a really messed up batch and at that point I was not sure of at least 80% of the questions. Any less preparation than this and I would have had a worse exam score. I’d say looking back , I could have passed it with 4 MPs and maybe 1BP in closing if I went for it with about 70 hours preparation less and about 1000 questions of mocks less.

 

The situation improved a LOT from question 90 until question 199. After doing these I was about 90% sure that I had an exam result in the 70% (a feeling that I honed during doing the mocks… I could feel if it was a good score and if it was in the 70s or 80s). I never ever scored in a mock under 69% .. even in the tough ones.. which proved to be important for confidence.

 

On the other hand, when I was at question 200 (and having most problem with it than all other questions) .. I was really feeling that there was absolutely no way I could have prepared even better. Maybe there were at top 2 theoretical situations that I could have explored if I failed.. but this was only 2 questions out of 200 on which I could improve. It was NOT a good feeling pressing that End button and knowing that if I failed after all, I would not have any clue whatsoever on how to prepare better and not have much clue on what I did wrong. I was pretty resigned to just scheduling one more exam just 3 days later.

 

This was not the first time either that I had faced this feeling, during my last set of mocks the only questions I seemed to fail were usually highly situational and debatable ones without any clear PMBOK answer. While this was comforting on one level it was also very discomforting knowing that 20% of the questions are pretty subjective without clear PMBOK reference and I can’t prepare in any meaningful way to them. As any project manager will tell you, we HATE uncertainty in our projects and like to stay in control J

 

Looking back at it, my study plan and strategy turned out to be very effective and efficient (if you don’t know the difference between the two, look it up, you’ll need it) and I fully recommend anyone else to use it. I did my strategy based on reading a lot of lessons learned from PMZilla and talking to colleagues who have passed or failed the exam..  Now that I have gone through the exam, I wouldn’t change a single thing at the study plan (detailed below) as every single part was really essential for me making such a high score.

 

The PMP Exam experience:

 

Day 0 – Woke up at 8:00 AM, got a light breakfast to keep my energy high but not burden my body with food processing, went through a small walk through the city on the way to the bus station to clear my head a bit and sat on the bus for a 2 and half hour ride to the capital of Prague.

 

I used the two and half hours in the bus to open my laptop and go through a 5^th quick review of the entire PMBOK … went through every single process and ITTO, read what they are about and filled any remaining gaps. I did NOT memorize any ITTO groups, I only made sure that whenever I see an ITTO I would know exactly what it is about and be very likely to know if it is an ITTO to a given process being asked in the question.

 

Arrived at the center, spoke to the guy operating the center.. he explained the rules , and I got rid of all my stuff (empty pockets and all). I did think about hiding a list of ITTO in my pocket and checking it at the toilet (no cameras there!) just in case I got stuck on a question or 2 J … but I quickly deduced that its not worth the trouble given all the fuss PMI takes about ethics and stuff… so one thing is for sure .. you can’t cheat on this exam… to be honest even if you had the PMBOK in your lap .. it won’t do you all that much good since you need to be very fast and focused. It was very annoying that the guy was entering the room every 10 minutes and getting a finger scan (luckily not of myself) .. I mean come on.. too much security is too much! .. there were like 5 cameras and three mirrors surrounding me and he was 2 meters outside the room in front of a big window … browsing the internet J.

 

This is a 4 hour exam , your brain will get challenged like never before and time is of the essence. I am a pretty fast exam taker by all standards and I was doing 200 questions comfortably in 3 hours on pretty much every mock I took (except PM Zilla tough and Lehman’s 175q). The real PMP exam took me 3:20h (including 2 breaks, each 3 minutes)… I targeted a speed of 1 minute per question and it worked. T then I used the remaining 34 minutes for quick review… I had only 2 minutes left when I felt that I have 100% used my knowledge and skills and for every question I would not figure anything else any better even if I had 2 hours left. If this sounds nicely lucky , believe me it is not… only after doing 3500 questions and measuring and adjusting my speed I was able to achieve this kind of feeling of accuracy for the real exam and use it most efficiently.

 

I read a lot of reviews saying the real exam is a bit harder than PM Study … well… I truly felt that it was about 30-50% harder.. also a lot more time consuming on calculation and network diagram questions … They required a lot more effort and calculation and were not very straightforward. I heard other people had only one network diagram repeated throughout the test… I had around 5! … all different ones and pretty time consuming to draw and calculate (usually with 6 tasks with different relationships). While not difficult , they were real time eaters. Originally I wanted to double check all calculations and network questions after Q200 , but I did not have time for this.

 

There was even one very funny question where they showed you a HUGE diagram with 10-15 tasks and about 20 relationships.. When I first saw it I was like ‘come on! .. you’ve GOT to be kidding me!!… it will take ages to calculate this’… But then I saw the question and laughed J

 

Calculate the free float on the critical path ;)

 

I ate a chocolate bar at the start to get my brain at max mode, a trick I learned at science Olympics (Snickers is my choice of bar for this reason J )… then used 11 minutes of the tutorial to write down all the 42 processes and also some basic formulas. Even if I didn’t plan to do it originally… it helped a great deal … because with all the stress, new environment and thinking… somewhere around question 160 you start to get really phased and it really helps having the map of processes by your side. Doing the full simulation on PMStudy made me realize this. When you are at real exam mode, at Q170 you even forget how to calculate cost variance. This initial sheet also got my brain into PMP mode to start full force on question 1.  Although it took about 30 questions to really warm up.

 

I was really angry when one of the choices had its character set messed up and a key word inside was in gibberish (%$(*%$%%) .. Since I suspected this to be the right answer, I thought about reporting this to the admin… but decided not to bother because I felt I will pass. Thinking about it now, if I reported this they would probably have reset my exam or even worse re-schedule for another date... so I think I made the right call to just sacrifice this question.

 

Question 100 – 3 minutes break + another chocolate bar to refresh my mind (again a trick from the science Olympics , I had found that after 2-3 hours the brain runs out of energy and you basically can’t think full force and a chocolate really really helps give you the energy boost (on one competition this caused me to really suffer in the last hour and lose performance.. so it was a lessons learned to always bring chocolates after that experience J )… Question 200 – 3 minutes break. About 50 questions for review in 40 minutes remaining.  At this moment I felt I am only one click away from the title and it was a GOOD feeling but I restrained and reviewed all the questions. Went back and changed few choices (3-4 at most). With 2 minutes remaining I clicked the end button.. got the survey done and got the results… Very long seconds of white screen J .. Those that have went through it know how it feels like

 

The PMP exam is not that hard if you do the right preparation but it becomes impossible if you don’t employ the right strategy … that’s why I’ve heard of PHds going for a third time to take it and of people studying really hard but failing … I think a lot of people fail because they don’t have the right approach. The PMP exam is like a game of poker and it is a probability game and a certain mindset.. The only questions you are 100% sure is only the calculations and network diagrams … so they are like your joker wild cards. I swear I almost felt guilty whenever I got such a question because I felt it was so much easier and solvable with primary school knowledge when compared to some of the much more ‘experience based’ questions a real PM would only know about. Everytime a calculation or network question popped up I was like ‘hooray, another free 100% correct question J ‘

 

To be honest, 2 days before the exam I was still not ‘getting it’. I felt like I am doing a terrible job that even after so much study and practice I was still doing ‘only’ 80% in reputable mocks… but I got a good advice on PMZilla that 30% of the questions are not set in stone and are pretty much debatable… and I have to say this is the right approach and mindset to take. Just because you got a question wrong doesn’t mean you are really 100% wrong … it is just the other side took a different point of view and you have to live with that. Whenever in doubt, always refer to the PMBOK .. if the PMBOK doesn’t specify it then you shouldn’t care too much anyway.

 

The process of preparing for PMP and basically pwning! (yea I used to be a vivid MMORPG player pwning a lot of noobs J) the exam with Ps can be summarized as following:

 

 

1)      Lessons Learned – Before I started doing anything I made sure to ask around what is PMP , how does it look , how people prepared etc etc. You need to focus on two groups of people .. people who failed and people who got all Ps (or at least 4 in the major processes) – like me lol. PMP exam has almost nothing to do with experience and prior knowledge… you need to analyze the people who failed in order to avoid what they did … and you need the all Ps people .. in order to do exactly what they did (or very close) and most importantly … compare your scores with their PMStudy scores. Just few days ago I did that and my score was almost the same in PMStudy with another user who got the same results in the PMP Exam (4Ps and 1Mp). DO NOT focus on people who barely passed with a lot of MPs … Their lessons learned are generally valuable, that is true .. but if you did what they did and follow all their advice… you can’t hope to have a better score than they did .. The problem with people who did MPs .. is that you don’t know which of their study plan contributed to the score and which of their plan led them astray from achieving a higher score. PMP exam is a mind set.. and it is very easy to get ‘tuned out’ if you prepare the wrong way.. More preparation in PMP does not bring more results… it can be very detrimental if it is contradictory to the previous preparation.…more on that later.

 

2)      Theoretical knowledge of each of the knowledge area and process (I did this at the start by reading PMBOK + Rita for each chapter). Don’t bother with Rita after this and don’t bother to understand ITTO in detail at this moment.. its just too much to absorb.

 

3)      Rita and fastrack are dangerous to rely on. They might have been great few years back but the exam has considerably evolved since then. No more lengthy questions, NONE questions whatsoever using situations with 3 correct choices and having to pick the incorrect one. Use it only as basic reference and focus on PMBOK. Rita is great at explaining to you HOW and WHY things are done, I refered to it only if I wanted to understand stomething … but she doesn’t use the same language as PMBOK, and it is VERY important to be able to speak in PMBOK terms and definitions. Relying only on Rita is like trying to learn German from a French person.. it just doesn’t make sense J. I read it only once and looked back only few times to find specific information.

4)      Understanding of how all these small parts interact with each other under different circumstances. The only way you can achieve this is through going through about 3000 mock questions (bare minimum imho, this number ensures that you meet each ITTO and situation about 5-7 times with small variations). I have a solid real PM experience for 5 years and it didn’t help very much with this process. It did help at understanding the how and why parts though.

5)      Learning to process efficiently the questions. Getting used on where to look for what is the question and what is the key thing being asked (again only mock questions will do this). You can find yourself missing 20 questions in your first mocks just because you didn’t read the question efficiently and missed a key word.

6)      Learning to speak PMBOK …. You can be a very good PM but for this exam you must speak PMBOK. In many questions I could see the answer immediately like a red light in a snow because 3 of the choices were sentences and words spoken in PMBOK language. Those were sometimes very very close in meaning to the answer … so if you didn’t speak PMBOK it would be very hard to pick the right choice. (For example a quality review and quality audit.. its almost the same thing in English .. but quality review is not a ‘real’ thing in PMBOK ITTO). Whenever I found non PMBOK items vs PMBOK items and I was not sure between them, I always went for the PMBOK item to be on the safe side.

7)      ITTO mastery. NOT memorization of how they are grouped. You must recognize an ITTO whenever you see it , know exactly what it does and how it is used, know if it is an input, TT or output and be able to guess with high probability its relationship to a given process. Memorizing the groups of ITTO is crazy and would not help very much. This alone will get you half of the exam right. Many times they tell you what someone is doing and you have to pick what ITTO they are using.

8)      Confidence and speed – Doing 1 to 7 is not enough. You have to be able to do it confidently and quickly. Remember this is a game of poker .. you must see a situation, evaluate and react quickly with your best bet. You are never 100% sure (except on calculation and network) so you must have built a good feeling of confidence and speed to your picking of answers. After going through 3500 questions I swear I could feel the probability of my picks … I was like ‘ok , this one is 80% probably right, this is 90% , this one is 50%) .. and I just picked the highest probable one. I also played it safe… even if I felt something is a trick question, I always went with the more obvious and PMBOK language one. If you are getting 80% in PMStudy, don’t try to get even smarter for the real thing. Just rely on the intuition you have already developed. The only way to achieve this is to take the right mock exams at the right time. If your confidence and intuition gets messed up you will find yourself second guessing a lot, taking too much time to think and miss a lot of question. The more mocks you take, the faster you get ..I thought I was doing real fast but on the real exam it took me the whole 4 hours to really squeeze all knowledge out of myself in the most efficient way.

9)      Quality of mock exams – Doing just any questions is useless (I did only 100 low quality ones at the very beginning to get used to the format)… Doing too easy questions is not good, doing very hard ones is also not good. I used the strategy of doing the easy ones first (to fill my basic theory gaps) , then going for the toughest ones (to further fill my deep theory gaps) and then in the end going for the ones that were said to be closest to the real exam in order to build skills like feeling, confidence, speed etc etc. A lot of people make the mistake of trying out the best quality exams they can find in the beginning of their study… DON”T DO IT.. good questions are hard to find (yes even paid ones) .. so use the right mock at the right time at the right knowledge level to optimize your confidence. If you do the most reputable ones.. there are about 10-15 questions that are almost the same or employ the same key strategies and situations. You need to also switch between different mock providers, because a mock imprints upon you a certain mindset and dynamic of answering questions, that’s why you find people failing who used fastrack too much which is way too situational and doesn’t use PMBOK language enough.

10)  Closing process group.  I saw this trend developing during the mock exams and I thought it was a fluke.. but as it kept repeating I saw it is a problem. I was consistently ranking lowest in closing across all mocks. I did my very best to prepare and study this topic a lot more than the others (even if it is so short) and again I fell short in the real PMP as well.. and to this day I have no idea how to improve it more.. not that it matters now J . I saw also based on scores of other people that this is a problem area. I have no solution for how to best prepare… just do not underestimate it… do your best in this tricky group.

11)  Exam schedule date Pretty much everyone I know scheduled the exam and then raced towards it. This is the worst possible idea you can have. PMP is not a normal exam when you cram the knowledge, keep it in your head for 5 days and then spill it out. It is a slow absorption process where your brain and feeling must adapt to the knowledge and you must take one depth at a time. Schedule your exam only after you hit high scores in the reputable mocks. You need to peak at the right time. If you schedule too early or too late , you risk losing your form and not performing at your best. I scheduled my exam 5 days in advance once I felt I will be 100% ready in 5 days with few reputable mocks left. And one other tip… don’t tell anyone when you are going, especially not your PM colleagues because you are stressed enough already even without all the ‘good lucks’ and ‘let us know how it goes’ and thinking how you will be telling everybody you failed if you do fail J. This came from my 1vs1 study partner who told me not to tell him when I am taking the exam so that he doesn’t have to think about me lol … thanks… I guess J

 

 

Study Plan and Mocks Review (in retrospect to the real exam, I advice to do the mocks in this precise order for reasons stated above.. DO NOT waste the good mocks early in your preparation)

11^th of July – START

Read PMBOK chapter X , read RITA’s chapter X, do chapter end questions, do 30 questions from ITTO test simulator http://www.webgale.com/free-pmp-itto-mock-exam/ .. rather easy when done by chapter, success rate for ITTO simulator in 95%

Repeat step for all the chapters

End chapter results always taken one day later from reading of chapter (to simulate real exam conditions of not so fresh knowledge)

End Chapter test results – average 81%

Special IBM Study internal materials – average 83%

This provided me a lot of confidence that even with basic knowledge I was able to hit 80%

27^th of July – FINISH first pass study

Read through Kim Feldman’s PMP review (very useful since it gave me a much needed second dimension to the knowledge as it is organized by process groups).  It also contained some stuff not found in PMBOK nor Rita

02^nd of August – Start real Mock testing

It is important to note that I did my very best NOT to do any mocks twice .. so all the results here are on first pass only. For some of them I also deliberately did them while watching the Olympics or while being at work , to see the impact of low concentration on my scores … this proved to be about 5% or about 10 questions missed if I was not trying very hard to read and think. This was an important part because in the real exam you are stressed, new environment, new monitor etc etc.. so you need to be ready to operate outside of perfect conditions of your home and you need to be confident that even under such conditions you are able to perform.

A friend gave me this http://www.actualtests.com/exam-PMI-001.htm ... I did 100qs but found it to be of very bad quality – 100 questions – 75% … after which I threw it away. I started with this low quality just to warm up and saved the quality questions for when my knowledge would be higher.

Kim Feldman end chapter average – 70%

Exam Central 200qs – 86%

PMStudy 4 – 85%

Exam Central 200qs – 86% (I stopped using it after this as questions began repeating and was becoming rather easy)

Special IBM internal prep mock (close to PMStudy but a bit off) – 79.5%

Lehman 75q – 74%

Fastrack 200qs – 78.5% (very disappointed that many questions repeat from end chapter)

Lehman 175q – 82%

PMZilla tough mock – 69.5%

Review PMBOK in detail (really helped and I saw it with different eyes this time)

PMStudy 3 – 81%

PMStudy 2 – 85%

PMPForSure free 100q – 74% (very disappointed on this one, lots of grammatical errors and half of the questions I missed even after reading the explanation I did not find myself satisfied with the answer provided) I heard a lot of good reviews about PMPForSure on this forum… but having passed through all the rest .. I decided not to pursue it any further..

16^th of August  – 2 days to go

Fastrack (2^nd ever exam 200qs) – 89.5 – When  I saw this score at the end I knew PMP is within my reach (even if about 10% of questions were repeat from end chapter and previous test and I answered them on memory).

17^th of August  – 1 day to go

PMStudy 1 – full simulation mode including a small break at q100 .. 78% - when I saw I had reached the same score on this one as a user on PMZilla who did 4Ps.. I knew I had a really good chance at the real exam. The problem was this user had scored this one week before the exam and prepared after that even more to fill the gaps. I used the same thing he did… that was to study and review all the ITTO’s … and that was an extremely good decision to make. Going through all the ITTOs several times in the last couple of days + in the last hours before the exam proved to be a difference of about 10%. There were questions I would have surely had trouble with if I had not made final detailed reviews through every ITTO and important definition and made sure I understand its meaning, use and wording.

The night before I just watched some TV Shows and relaxed. Do NOT study any major new material in the last couple of days and do not spend more than 5 hours.. or you will have fatigue for your real exam.

Day 0 – explained above

 

Final thoughts and advice

 

PMP is a journey unlike any other. If you really go all the way in this one, you will learn a LOT .. not necessarily on project management lol .. but mostly on your own capabilities on how to manage a big undertaking like this, stay disciplined and be able to analyze a vast amount of information from several (sometimes contradicting!) sources and adapt to it. In this retrospect, PMP has been most useful to prove to myself that ‘I still got it’ J .. even 15 years after my last science Olympics.

 

I have a masters degree, have done countless exams, oral and written and also did the ITIL certification … they don’t come anywhere near close to PMP in extent to preparation strategy and scope.  I have also competed in my high school in science Olympics and the PMP has a lot more in common to those. It’s all about achieving peak performance in 4 hours, relying much more on your instincts, intuition and imagination rather than pure theoretical knowledge. Somewhere around question 170 when things started to get blurry, with stress levels rising high, the clock ticking and anxiety rising .. there were moments that I stopped reading and understanding the questions.. I just went through it, saw PMBOK language vs ‘something else’ .. and knew immediately that the right answer is the PMBOK language… only after a minute of careful analysis I came rationally to the same conclusion.

 

One has to wonder though, if the PMP title really means something to show a good project manager from a bad one. I am left feeling that going through the course ‘Project Management Fundamentals’ 5 years ago, gave me the same knowledge as achieving the prestigious PMP with 4Ps … the only difference being is that now I can speak PMBOK. Which in my organization where nobody speaks it that much , it is almost as useful trying so speak Klingon on Vulcan J

 

I am reminded to something a certain person said, that PMP is a vocabulary test.. not a PM certification … I leave you to ponder on that thought when you find yourself reading each ITTO and associating its short name with certain explanations J

 

Oh and btw … The most important part of the PMBOK for passing the exam??? … the Glossary section! J … Enjoy!