TOPIC: don't remember details of projects

Hi all,

I am looking to get my PMP certification. I am still in the early stages of everything, but I have a quick question about listing the PM experience in the application. I was a Project Manager for a translation company for about 4 years. Basically, companies would send us documents that we would then translate into different languages for them. At any given time, PMs were usually managing about 5-8 different projects. The majority of these projects only lasted a month or two. So I must have worked on about 200 projects during my time there. My question is this: Since my projects were so small and so frequent, I do not remember the details for the large majority of them - so how detailed do the project descriptions have to be? Can the project objective be something like "To translate a document into 5 languages" or does it need to be more specific than that? If I were still at my previous company, I would be able to look back on our servers to get specific details about the projects I worked on, but since I am no longer there, I'm concerned that I won't be able to provide the information that they're looking for. Additionally, if I am audited, I'm worried that if my project information is incorrect (wrong start/end dates, wrong amount of time spent on the project, etc.), my former supervisor will not sign the documentation and my application will be rejected.

Any advice around this (particularly from any PMs who also has lots of similar small projects) would be much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

A project is a unique product, service, or result. In your case, you seem to have provided a service. In my opinion what you have seems good to me.

Thanks, Ty. In your opinion, would I need to list all 150+ projects (or however many of those it takes to reach the 4500 PM hours) knowing that a lot of the details (start/end dates, number of documents, specific languages, etc.) might be incorrect? Or could I combine a lot of the projects and make more general entries like "To translate numerous medical documents from English into other languages?" even though this single entry would encompass multiple projects? Please note that I'm not trying to shortcut anything - I would be more than happy to list out every single project I worked on - but my concern is just that due to my lack of recollection surrounding the specifics of all of these projects, I risk submitting incorrect information. Thanks again.

Overlapping of projects is not allowed, so you will need find the ones that do not overlap and use those. I believe the PMI site will truncate any overlapping projects on the website. I too had multiple projects and had to use the non0overlapping ones.
In addition, you cannot combine projects. It is one project at a time.
See the PMI website for more info on this subject.

I was under the impression that we cannot use overlapping projects to satisfy the number of months requirement (this should not be an issue as I worked for the company for more than 3 years) but we CAN use overlapping projects to satisfy the number of hours requirement. If I am not able to list overlapping projects at all, then I believe I may be in a bit of a pickle when it comes to totaling up all of my PM hours...

An update to my previous reply - I entered some projects into the PMI website and I am indeed able to list overlapping projects. The overlapping hours will count but the overlapping months will not. So I reckon I will proceed with listing all of the projects I worked on (which will probably take quite a while) and will just try to make the details as accurate as possible. Thanks for the help.