Passed PMP on 31^st July

I passed my PMP on 31^st July with 3P’s and 2 MP’s. I have been a silent follower of this forum (not often but when I visited I used to spent quite a bit of time) and did post few questions here and there. I would like personally thank all the folks who post their LL’s( quite of bit of inspiration from them), Raj Pavani( He is my neighbor in US and main reason for taking up PMP), KK, Pawarji and admin of the forum for their support and my neighbors who fed me while my family was away J.All my neighbors knew I was taking the exam and came out to celebrate when I was done as I almost went into a hole and closed it with a rock behind me for last one month. Make sure you let your friends know when u take this exams so they don’t bother you.

Reason for taking up PMP: I was not motivated by any promotion or any other pressure at work to take this exam. I took this out of boredom and to spend time effectively as my kid and wife are vacationing in India. Strange reason but true and I wanted to have the three letters put after my name.

Methodology and Books:

I started my preparation on June 1^st and I have to admit I did not even know what was in the PMP curriculum and the process to apply for the exam when I started. So it was very much a learning process for me. Decided to give it only 1 try and if I failed, I took an oath not to attempt again. For any newbie’s just starting, I will have to say you need to commit yourself for getting there. I depended on following materials till the day of my exam

1)     

PMP Prepcast by Cornelius Fichtner

2)     

PMBoK

3)     

Rita Mulcahy’s book

At this point I would like to add one advice which was passed on to me by another PMP before I started preparation. Just chose 1 other book to extend the concept of PMBoK. TMI( Too Much Of Information) is dangerous. For me I had to use PMPrepcast to give steam to the preparation and introduce to this concept and curriculam of PMP as I had confessed that I did not have any any idea about it. I listened to Prepcast audio/video prepcast seriously only first 2 weeks till I got rough idea and I just reviewed couple of his chapters later on about Earned Value, Decision Tree Analysis etc.I read PMBOK 2 times and Rita one time for next 4 weeks. Iam a slow reader but I tried to analyze and used google a lot to get multiple view points for some topics that I wanted more clarity like Decision tree analysis, Closing and Initiation processes( deepbrainfried.com has lot of interesting topics around this)

 Two days before the exam, in my office nook, I had all the ITTO’s pages from PMBoK on the wall and tried to follow end to end couple of times. It helped me a lot. You might want to try to do this for longer. Don’t try to memorize ITTO’s. Try to understand the concept.

Though I read PMBoK and Rita combined only 3 times, you will be amazed how much time I spent to complete those iterations. I used to spend 4 hours on weekdays and 8-9 hours on each of the sat and Sunday’s.

I used to take lot of random questions from this forum and tried KK’s 10 Q’s for the day for last few days. All the exams I took, I never scored in any exam less than 74-75%. I took following exams

1)     

Simplilearn ( easy – scored 80% without even reading last few chapters in PMBoK)

2)     

Exam Central (79%)

3)     

PM Study1 ( 74%)

4)     

PM Study3 ( 78%)- I took this on D-day-2 and gave me lot of confidence. PM Study exams are very close to exam.

5)     

OliverLehman’s 50 Q’s and 175 Q’s ( 175 Q’s- I took this over day to complete since it’s a PDF and there is no timer to push you to complete in time)

6)     

BrainBok  2 50 Q’s exams

My 2cents- general:

1)     

I see lot of friends posting on this website taking around 10-12 exams and still looking around for more. I would advice do around 4 and spend a lot of time finding gaps where you did not do good by reviewing them.

2)     

 I personally used to spend around 6 hours reviewing the exam results after I took the exam ( even the correct ones to ensure my reasoning was correct and ensured I did not get answers correct in fluke) and this technique though some might feel waste of time , really helped me to think PMI way which is key to the exam.

My 2 cents from exam and exam day experience:

My exam was at 2:30PM and I reached the exam center around 2 PM and I was let in to take the exam early. I used complete 4 hours for my exam. I marked lot of questions for review. I took a break for a leak after 160 questions for 4 mins.  I completed my exam in 3 hours and 5 mins and this was my standard even in my test exams. I spent entire 55 mins reviewing the questions thoroughly and might have changed 5 answers and corrected a simple math problem which I did incorrectly. I was very confident while I answered the questions in the first pass and started getting nervous when I was reviewing the questions.

Some tips on exam

1)     

I saw atleast 4 questions on Storming, Forming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning stages and people behavior on those stages. Understand them in detail

2)     

On Network diagrams, do not try to waste time in doing forward path/backward path on everything without reading the question. You might not need to do all in most of the cases (at least I did not do it in 2 two questions in my exam). All I had to do was separate that path to answer the question on that path. Get longest duration path and set it as critical path and then try to do backward pass just for the path in question using longest duration.It might save you atleast 2-4 minutes

3)     

Surprisingly I did not see a single NEGATIVE or asking for BEST question like, which of the following is “NOT” or is “BEST” in some process etc.

4)     

Make sure you use calculator on the computer. Its simple math but that really helps to make sure you get all those easy math questions correctly.

I was very curious after I completed the exam and wanted to know the result right away, so skipped the survey and screen went blank with lot of processing messages. I was nervous for a while but magically “ Congratulations” message came and I was relieved seeing it and was more happy when I saw 3P’s and 2 MP’s. Was more happy to see P in Initiation, Planning and executing.

Hope these LL’s help someone.

Thanks again to all