Yeah Boy! I passed the PMP Exam… (Part 1)

April 25, 2010 · Posted in Information Systems, Life Happens, Project Management, Yeah Boy! Yah Suck! 

Four months of being a near-recluse, self-studying and sometimes overly stressing finally paid off. I passed the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam yesterday. For folks who are not familiar with the certification, Project Management Professional (PMP) is a credential offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Click here to learn more about the PMI and its credentialing programs. As of 30 June 2009 (2009 -06-30), there were 359,973 PMP certified individuals distributed globally.

As extracted from the ever-reliable Wikipedia ;-) :

Government, commercial and other organizations employ PMP certified project managers in an attempt to improve the success rate of projects in all areas of knowledge, by applying a standardized and evolving set of project management principles as contained in PMI’s PMBOK Guide.

Professionals obtain the credential to verify their proficiency in project management with an internationally accepted certificate. It has proven especially helpful for project managers trying to find jobs or self-employed project managers selling their services to customers.[citation needed]

Many contractors hire certified PMPs to make their bids and proposals more attractive to prospects. Sometimes, IFBs or RFPs require that project managers must be certified PMPs.

In December 2005, the PMP credential was tied for fourth place in CertCities.com’s 10 Hottest Certifications for 2006, and in December 2008, it was number 7 of ZDNet’s 10 best IT certifications.

I also found an article from About.com that list PMP as the highest paying certifications in the tech industry. Now if I could only put that article into reality for myself, it will be awesome considering I now hold two of the top four certifications listed in that article (the other being Certified Information Systems Security Professional or CISSP). :-)

In any case as I did with my previous cert “conquests” (CISSP and CISM), I bypassed paying for the expensive training and opted to go the hard way, actually hitting the books and doing self-study the best way I know how. There were several factors that made it a little bit more difficult for me to focus this time around. I won’t talk about those factors in this entry as I don’t have any illusions or interest of being in a reality show ;-) . However, suffice it is to say that I was actually a little bit worried that I may not pass this one on the first try as I did in the other two.

To add to this is the fact that even though I have been using and somewhat familiar with various project management principles for quite some time, there are quite a number of concepts and terminologies in the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) that was very new to me. Another key challenge was the way the PMBOK is intended to be learned. Much unlike the CISSP’s Common Body of Knowledge, wherein one can learn each of the 10 domains independently, the PMBOK is a methodology, whose knowledge areas are interdependent and with process groups that follow a particular road-map and relationships and have independent processes that within themselves have separate elements that inter-relate with other processes.

So aside from simply remembering terms and what-have-you, to effectively master the PMBOK, one must be able to understand how each of the knowledge areas, process groups, processes and elements (process input/output and tools and techniques) inter-relate and which one comes first. Needless to say it was a doozy.

Continued in Yeah Boy! I passed the PMP Exam… (Part 2)

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