Hello all,

I am extremely delighted to inform all that I cleared PMP today, 1st attempt.

I have to thank all the folks in here who posted their LL and experiences which helped me a lot in understanding and preparing for the exam.

Due to lack of time (I was bogged down by project work and by the time I realized I was 1 month short of loosing my eligibility and exam fees, as I booked rather ambitiosuly very early last year) I couldn't manage to memorize ITTO's or all the scheduling and cost calculations.

But I did spend quality time reading the concepts around Knowledge Areas and Process Groups - the precedences, specific inputs and outputs, the tools and techniques of critical processess, amd more importatntly understand the logic and reasoning behind the way they are setup that way, in other words getting into the shoes of a PMI Project Manager. The concepts and shortcuts learnt in my training institute also were handy in fast tracking my prep.

And this helped me during mock tests to get a hang of the questioning pattern, and was useful in real exam when facing the really complex questions.

I answered all questions in 1st pass based on my initial impressions, marking even the slightly dodgy ones for review. So, I was done with this by halfway into exam and in the review (thankfully) I corrected most of the answers. I suggest utilize all the alloted time for the exam to review and re-review all the answers which we are not sure of..you never know which one will be clincher!

I clicked on 'end exam' when about 10 mins was left and started praying..:-)  thankfully the magic words .." Congratulations.." appeared and I was very very happy..

I thank my wife and kids for bearing with me while I was missing weekends with them, studying in local library for PMP..

All the best for all PMP aspirants and trust me its not as difficult as we think it is, we only gotta believe in ourselves..

Cheers :-)

Vamshi