Things to know before becoming a PMP – Part Three

If after all of the soul-searching you have decided (or are required) to get your PMP, as mentioned we now turn to a whole new set of questions. The first question I always get is this:

Well, yes it is. This fact is well-known and is much discussed by those who are seeking to get their certification. I even recently got a question from a Mensa member about its difficulty! Why is it difficult? Because it is a four-hour, 200 question multiple-choice exam covering a wide breadth of PM and non-PM areas. When’s the last time you took one of those? But unfortunately there is no metric I can apply to tell you just how difficult it is.  I can’t say, for example, that it is 40% harder than the GMAT. OR 20% easier than the CPA exam.  For one thing I’ve never taken any of those exams. For another, the comparison is ludicrous. I can give you some idea of what makes it so difficult. Firstly you are expected to know and be able to test on a wide variety of topics. PMI identifies nine knowledge areas, namely, Cost, Scope, Time, Integration, Quality, Procurement, Human Resources, Communications and Risk. (And in PMBOK V5, they expend it to ten to include Stakeholder Management).  Also covered are accounting terms, conflict resolution and management terms, psychological theories, standard deviation and the like.

I like to tell my students that PMI expects you to be a mile wide and an inch deep in many areas. So for example, an inch deep in accounting where you have to know terms such as Net Present Value and Opportunity Cost. But you’re not expected to know accounting in depth. I believe it’s PMI’s expectation that you be able to converse intelligently with accountants not become one. But in areas where you are the expert, such as scheduling, their expectations are greater. So you need to learn manual methods such as network diagramming forward and backward pass. They also expect you to know mathematical calculations for use in such areas as Earned Value. Is the math particularly hard? Nope. Second grade math I think. But quite a few of my students confess to math phobias. And many of them are adults who have not taken any sort of exam in 20-25 years. And there is quite a bit of reading and memorization as well as at least a couple of pages of formulas and tricks you must memorize and learn how to brain dump just before the exam. (No materials of any sort can be brought into the exam area).

I could talk for a while about the difficulty of the exam but I thought that I would give you just one idea of a typical PMP-type question. I have sometimes written these questions for a customer of mine and believe me, they are not much more fun to write than they are to take. Here’s the question:

You have recently been asked to take over a project.  One activity turns out to be very complex technically. You look at the schedule and discover it has an early start of day 9 and a late start of day 15. The CPI is .78 and SPI is 1.10. What is your main area of concern?

A. Schedule

B. Cost

C. Resources

D. Scope

So you can see that the question (the ‘stem’ in our parlance) is situational. By that I mean it throws the exam-taker into a particular situation and asks how he would handle it. I point this out to note that the exam is not just about rank memorization, although there are some of those questions on the exam. But much of it deals with what you would do in a given situation, how you would go about solving a particular problem.  And typically these are very tough to answer even for a seasoned PM. Because, you see, there is YOUR way of doing it and the PMI way. And guess which one they want you to use? And guess how you learn that?

As to the answer, there is no way you could get this right unless you’d either been studying for the PMP or worked in an Earned Value environment. (Or were a very good guesser). And so if you’ve studied, you’d know that CPI and SPI are both Earned Value terms. CPI stands for Cost Performance Index and it is a measure of your cost efficiency on the project. Below one is bad. SPI stands for Schedule Performance Index and is a measure of your schedule efficiency on the project. Again, below one is bad. What’s interesting in this question is that those are really the only two pieces of information that add value to the question. If CPI is below one, then we know that we are not working efficiently on cost and that is the area we must focus on. So the answer is B, Cost. Schedule is not an issue since we are above one. The question does not address either resources or scope. Everything else in the question is noise, put there to throw you off.

So what’s the bottom line on exam difficulty? It’s very challenging and I don’t know of anybody, regardless of years of experience, who has walked in off the street and just passed it. (Please don’t try just reading the PMBOK. It’s more than just that). But if you’ve decided to go for the exam should this scare you off? No. But it should cause you to have a healthy respect for it. Because you know, I got it and I wasn’t the greatest student nor am I a Mensa member. Nor are, I daresay, the great majority of the thousands of people who have achieved it. How did they accomplish it? By doing what they did for any other exam in high school or college (or even grade school) – hard work and study. (I’ll talk later about how much hard work and study).

By the way, let me say something here about anxiety. I am no psychologist, but I can tell you that many of my students come in with a great deal of test anxiety. They haven’t taken a test in years, heard this one is really hard, and so, start fretting about it. One woman I had in class last year couldn’t sleep. Not the day before the exam. The day before class! Do not let anxiety overwhelm you. It is your worst enemy.

Ok, so now we know the exam is difficult, one of the hardest you’re likely to take. And you know that you’re going to have to work diligently to get it. In the next post we’ll discuss questions regarding cost outlays and various methods of study.

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