Preparing for the Project Management Professional, PMP Certification Exam

Acquiring the Project Management Professional, PMP Certification  is a challenge. It calls for a very strong commitment to cover the syllabus fuelled by a deep seated desire to pass the exam and above all, excellent exam question answering skills.

As a tutor who has conducted PMP Preparation courses for a number of years, I have found that there are two ways to pass the exam. The difficult way and the intelligent way. I like to share with aspiring students what, in my opinion is the intelligent way to prepare for and pass the PMP exam.

The intelligent way to prepare for the Project Management Professional certification, PMP certification is to adopt a three phase approach. The first phase is to have a good overview of what the course is about and more importantly, how the different aspects of the course link to one another. I call this developing familiarity of the coalition of interrelated issues such as processes as well as knowledge areas that will be covered. This is done by first reading abstracts or summaries of the different knowledge areas and processes to have a feel of what they refer to and try to see how these relate to one another with examples or based on your experience. A good starting point is to read the book “Head first” that provides excellent, simple to understand explanation of these concepts.

The second phase is to gradually dig deeper into the topics by focusing on key underlying principles that relate to the topic or are associated with the different processes. A good way to do this is by highlighting key concepts and developing your very own “things to remember” list or coming up with simple mind maps. This should be an ongoing activity during your preparation stage. Care should be taken during this time to be familiar with the terminology and to be aware of the subtle differences in some of the terms / phrases such as quality control, quality assurance etc.

The third phase is to completely immerse yourself in answering as many PMP standard type questions that you possibly can. There are a number of such sources that you should seek out and do as many of the questions as possible. A list of such sources should be identified and updated regularly. As a rule of thumb, I would recommend students preparing for the Project Management Professional, PMP certification exam to attempt at least 150 questions per topic and 200 questions per process group and scoring a minimum of 75% correct. A good source of high quality, PMP exam type questions are from Rita Mulcahy’s Exam Prep.

The more questions you answer, the more aware you will be of your “knowledge gap” and what types of “tricks” you can expect during the exam. Doing these questions under “exam type” conditions where the questions have to complete within a certain time frame helps you analyze the question and come up with an answer within the time span allocated. To do this better you should attempt 200 questions mock exams within the 240 minutes allocated.

Knowledge Management – The Basis of Survival Today

Knowledge broadly refers to what is known. On a personal level, it refers to a fluid mix of framed experiences, values, contextual information, and intuition that a person has. This knowledge provides an environment for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. Previously acquired knowledge is the basis for learning. Learning in turn leads to acquisition of more knowledge.

People bring to organizations their experiences, values, information and intuition which cumulatively comprise a huge resource of knowledge. This knowledge is referred to the organizational knowledge assets.

Capturing, distributing, retaining and effectively using organizational knowledge consciously and comprehensively is crucial. It cannot be left to ad hoc practices. It has to done systematically so that overall knowledge acquired is shared, retained and replenished as required. This is necessary in order to enable employees to organize and locate relevant knowledge and expertise as and when needed.

For instance, an engineer may be spending a lot of time trying to solve a technical problem that has already been solved in the past. However, this engineer may have no access to how this technical problem was solved. A project manager may encounter an event that delays a project from being completed in time. This event was not captured as a risk as the relevant people were not involved when the risk register was developed. A company may have plans to invest into another business but do have access to the right expertise to guide them along on what exactly are the pitfalls they have to avoid.

The situations above typify difficulties associated with the ability to systemize the knowledge base within and from other an organizations or people. Hence it is necessary to be clear on what tools have to be used to gather, organize, refine and disseminate knowledge? Where does relevant knowledge originate from and where is it destined for? What knowledge is critical to an organization? How is this knowledge organized, shared and retained?

Coming to grips with the above requires a relook at how knowledge is being managed in an organization. It calls for a comprehensive reassessment of the key resource people bring to an organization, their knowledge and developing mechanisms to optimize this resource to stay ahead of the competition.

What is needed is a framework for managing knowledge. Such a framework should be developed after due consideration is given to the business and operational needs of the organization.

Developing a framework involves six steps. They include:

1.     Establish the desired outcome

2.     Clarify the scope in terms of where to focus and the approach to be adopted

3.     Specify the main focus, overall approach and time frame required

4.     Identify the issues and stakeholders involved

5.     Analyze areas for improvement, areas of strength and existing limitations

6.     Recommend proposed immediate, short term and long term action plans based on the analysis carried out

Adopting this six step approach simplifies the process of developing a framework that is customized and adapted to suit the immediate needs of an organization. It also provides focus on what is really important at the point in time the knowledge management initiatives are being introduced.

Developing and enhancing a knowledge management framework must be an essential, routinized activity that underlies all other activities. To do so, an organization should start building a strong awareness and understanding among employees on what is knowledge management all about and why it is so important.

In conclusion, managing knowledge assets is central to the continued success of any organization. Knowledge assets that exists will only yield positive results if they are managed systematically and formally. Developing a knowledge management framework that is customized to meet the needs of the organization is an important first step. Leveraging on that framework is what makes the real difference between companies that merely survive and those that succeed.

Dr Rumesh Kumar

Sharma Management International rumesh@sharma.com.my

Website: http://sharma.com.my/