PMP
Lessons Learned

Hi all!

I cleared
my PMP on 5^th January 2010 and feeling great. My two cents on the
exam preparation material used, exam itself and the pain staking 4 hours at the
exam center.

To begin
with just a brief background about me. Almost 5 years back I had cleared my
CAPM test so the process as such was not hard to adapt to. I remember at
that point one of the things i told myself  wasthat next time I should pay more attention to the ITTO’s
of all the processes (not mug them up but pay sincere attention).

I had
created a plan for myself and I guess I did follow it pretty much (may be by
the end lost the game plan but overall satisfied…will explain later). I started
preparing for PMP early September and simultaneously started to process my
application also. One thing worth mentioning here is that I am working full
time therefore finding time used to be a little challenging but overall used to
spend around 1:30-2 hours daily.

Preparation
Material:

Kim Heldmen’s book “Project Management Professional Exam
Study Guide”:

I started
with this book and read all the
chapters and did all the exercises at the end of each chapter (but not the
workbook exercises which are given at the end of the 12 chapters) and it took
around 1 month to complete.  It is a very
good book but had a lot of information which I think is good if you want
knowledge with respect to Project Management as whole. Therefore, I would
prefer to use it as a reference book but not as an exam guide.

Rita Mulcahy’s “ PMP Exam Prep 6^th
Edition”:

I had used
Rita’s book for CAPM exam prep and therefore had confidence in this book. This book is written more as a guide for
exam preparation rather than a book(with all kinds of details and what not).

Did all
the questions before starting the chapters and then re-did them once the chapter
was completed to see the difference. It took another month to complete this book. After completing it the first time I went through this book another
two times. After the second time I took some break of around 7-8 days and then
started giving sample tests while simultaneously reading Rita’s book for the third
time.

Some other
notes worth mentioning are:

1. Rajesh-Rani’s note available online
2. My personal notes
3. Some very good FREE notes
   about network diagramming, risk, podcast etc. on Rita’s website rmcproject.com

Practice
Tests:

There is a
huge database of questions available online but the ones worth mentioning are:

1.     

Oliver Lehman’s free questions
(175+75)- These questions are hard no doubt I scored around 68 percent but had
read on other forums that the questions on the exam are not this hard so was
kindda happy to score this much

2.     

PMP Fast Track- WOW I am glad 
I used this software as I think it was very close to the original exam. Did
around 60% of the questions and couldn’t even finish the full PMP exam with 200
questions( just did 100 and was so damn tired that just went to the results and
scored around 74%).

The
Original Exam:

As
mentioned in many forums the questions in the exam are not too wordy. The
maximum sentences a question had in my case was around 4. There were ITTO
related questions but you could answer them if you understand the processes
therefore you don’t need to memorize them. Questions requiring calculations
were very simple and did not require too much thinking. Two areas I had lot of
questions were Quality and Risk. VERY VERY IMPORTANT.

Started
the exam with writing all the formulae and the Planning process which I had
memorized from Rita’s Process Chart (didn’t help much but nevertheless was glad
I remembered all the processes). The exam center was very quite without any disturbances. I took an unscheduled break after 1 hr 40 minutes and by then had
finished around 130 questions. In the case of last 20 questions I became so
restless that I just wanted to finish this and get to the scoring. At the end
reviewed some marked question (around 15 in number0 and clicked END. The screen
went white and my heartbeat started racing after few flickers... the survey
came ( I was literally cursing…) went through the survey ASAP and then again
clicked END and after going through the same agonizing 10-15 seconds the screen
said “CONGRATULATIONS”

I scored proficient in 2 areas while moderately proficient in all the remaining 4

A word of
caution: you will find all kinds of materials
available free or with a price tag but make sure that you don’t overdo. Choose
may be two books(after some research) and try to work around them. In my case I
couldn’t get the date earlier (initially had planned for mid December but got
the date for 5^th January…HAPPY NEW YEAR) that around December end I
got so much fatigued that I ended up spending very less time on preparing and thus
scoring averagely on the sample tests I gave.

BEST OF LUCK TO FUTURE ASPIRINTS