Hello everyone,

 

Glad to inform that I have passed PMP exam with 3P's ,1 MP and 1 BP and wanted to share my experience.

I owe a lot to pmzilla forums which contains some of the best LL's. Go through them to understand what all can go rigth and wrong in your preparation.

 

Materials : 

1. Pmbok 4 and covered stakeholder and new topics in pmbok 5 

2. Rita 7 ( One thing missing from Rita are the I/O maps which I find it easier to understand the flow.This helped to avoid the need to memorize ITTO's) 

3. PMP Study guide Joseph Philips ( I got this book from library a week before exam but found it very good. I regret not reading this book earlier. 

The concepts were explained in simple way and don't bore you like Rita) 

4. Deepfriedbrain(concepts) 

 

Tests : 

Oliver, Maths 101, Scordo ( 1-10 for practise, after 15 were pretty good ) 

PMstudy test 1 & 3 (bought few days before exam) 

PmZilla tough 200 (bought few days before exam) 

Simplilearn ( 2 tests) 

 

My few tips which can help you in your preparation. Although it worked for me please advise caution before following it. 

 

Before Exam : 

1. My preparation started 5 months back although I spent last one month of dedicated preparation after scheduling the exam.

The first two months were on browsing the Rita 7 and Pmbok 4. It helped to understand the keywords and get overall picture of how things fit together. 

Although I had project management experience, I found lot of gaps in my knowledge and spent more time in understanding them. 

 

2. The key is to understand your strengths and weaknesses during your preparation.

Have your own pattern of preparation which suit your needs. Some can study in two weeks of time whereas others need 2 months. 

If you are already strong in maths, spent more time on it to make sure score near perfect on that.

If you think Risk, Procurement, Quality are going to the the toughest concepts to understand, focus more on that.

 

3. Practise lot of free materials available in the internet. Note down the things which went wrong every time you attend a practise test. 

Once you consistently get 70% in 2-3 tests, schedule the exam and have an plan to cover the key topics and practise tests.

 

4. I had difficulty in focussing on the exam after 1-2 hrs. Made few mistakes because of by missing keywords in reading the question. 

Solution, attended 6 hours of tests on a fine Sunday to test my limits and get out of my comfort zone.

 

5. Only way to crack the situation questions is to practise more of them. It helps to find the pattern and sets your mind to think what they are trying to ask.

There is no hard and fast rule and few change is key words can get a completely different thinking.

 

6. Few of my practise tests were open book tests. Although it does not sound good, it helped to find the gaps then and there rather than at the end of exam.

If you have trouble remembering something and frequently refer that topic/formula, it should go in your brain dump.One method to mitigate your weakness!

 

On the Exam day:

 

7. I did not want to memorize the ITTO and spend valuable time in writing them on brain dump. But I memorized the data flow. For example, how WPD and WPI flow in the entire life cycle.

Few mnemonics on Risk , Communication and Stakeholder mgmt. which I forget often. It helped as a reference during  my exam. Few key formulas on EVM for double checking the answers.

 

8. Time management is very important on the exam day. My plan is to cover 25 question in 30 minutes. 

It helped me to plan at sufficient level which I can adjust easily. First 30 minutes I lagged a bit due to long questions so I have marked most probable answers instead of wasting time.

I caught up on easy questions and increased the lead by 10-20 questions over the course of exam. It helped to gain confidence during exam to have few buffers on your planned time.

 

9. Use the saved time at the end of exam to review your marked questions.

 

Hope this LL will help who are currently preparing and I would be glad to answer any specific item in detail. 

 

Regards,

Ram (rampras.s@gmail.com)