I wanted to pass on a technique that I used that really helped me out.
Just like everyone else I used a combination of material including all of the "free" example tests that I could find and a couple of extra books.
The whole process took me about 7 months of a lot of work, but finished close to my goal of 5 P's.
I started by taking the SkillSoft online training material - that took almost 3 months to complete all of the modules at over 60 hours total class time. I started taking detailed notes on these but abandoned that after a while because I felt that I would never finish in my lifetime.
I started with taking some of the free example tests and found that I was struggling to get in the 60% range so I knew where I stood. (demoralized)
I had to do something different, I was not getting any better scores on sample tests that I found and was getting frustrated. I just decided that in order to succeed I would need to get very familiar with the PMBOK guide.
In the end the best thing I did was to start at the beginning of the PMBOK guide and "write my own book" or write up a series of narratives that summarized the information in each chapter that outlined the overview of the process and the lists of ITTO's with some description about the importance of each.
I eventually built a template that I used for the main knowledge area chapters.
I started writing this and made two PDF files. One organized the processes by each knowledge area and a second one with the processes organized by the process groups.
I put the pdfs on my phone and found a pdf reader that I liked (@Voice) and played the pdfs over and over while I was doing stuff. Sitting in the car, riding my bike, hiking, mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, whenever I had the chance. (No I did not try while sleeping and subliminal suggestion). I played it back at about 85 or 90% normal speech so that I had time to repeat the words in my head as they were being read to me. I would alternate from one to the other and the more I listened the more I would understand about the processes and information flow between them. I ended up with about 150 pages of notes in a document that provide about 4 hours of narrative.
It took a long time to write this all up and go through the PMBOK guide with information about the questions that I missed or guessed on and kept adding more and more info to the notes. I also use Crowe's PMP Exam book to get the info on the "Theory's" and other additional information for some of the questions that come up about material not in the PMBOK guide. I also used the example questions at the end of the chapters. (my personal opinion about Rita's book is TMI and I would never finish reading it, but I did use it a lot early in my process as I was looking for the right combination of material for me) (my personal opinion on Crowe's book is that it is condensed, but it does highlight important things and augments the information especially around the organization and HR theories that you need to know. I like that Crowe's book was easy and quick to read and the example questions were good. NOTE: I did not look at the "final exam" until a couple of weeks before my test in combination withe PMPrepCast tests.
In the last month or 6 weeks or so I concentrated 100% on the notes and the PMBOK guide, continually refining them. This is when I started using the PmPrepCast real example tests and was doing 1 or 2 per week and spending the rest of the week updating my notesPart of the refinement was to make the reader work and fixing the narrative nature of the notes and the PDF. I would take all the tests I could find, (put the Lehmann tests off until the end , they are too hard to play with early) and note that some of the free tests really are not very good and you can tell they are out of date pretty quickly by looking at the process names and things like that that are used in the questions.
Every time I listened I would hear something new, or hear something that just did not sound right or something that I obviously did not understand. As I updated the notes and listened to them over and over, my test scores stabilized in the mid 80's. ( I started feeling much more confident and finally scheduled my exam. ) I scheduled 2 weeks out from the day I decided that I was "ready" and spent that last 2 weeks working on the ITTO's more and repeated listening to the PDFs as much as I could stand it.
I wanted to mention something about the ITTO's
I took the advise of a friend who said to print out page 61 100 times and start highlighting which processes had which I's O's and TT's and look for patterns. I did this and it helped...
BUT.... What I ended up doing was instead of trying to memorize or figure out the list of ITTO's per process I turned it sideways and looked at a few key I's, O's and 1 tool and memorized which processes they were used in.
This was pretty easy actually, So I started practicing my "brain dump" by drawing the Process matrix and adding in code letters for a series of key Inputs. The inputs I concentrated on were OPFs EEFs PMPlan, Scope Statement, Scope Baseline, Change Requests and ACR's.
So by combining the first exercise with the second I could easily list out a lot of the ITTO's on the process chart. I concentrated on O's of OPF updates, EEF updates, CR's, PMPlan updates and project doc updates. and the only tool I memorized was Expert Judgement, If you add this all up it comes to over 200 of the 618 Ittos. OH and MOST IMPORTANTLY -- get a grasp of the flow of Work Performance Data, Info and Reports. you can add Change Log and Issue log to this because it's easy.
So between continuous practice of writing the process matrix and adding O's and P's and C's and E's and X's and a couple other easy ones to the left of the processes and writing and listening and updating and cleaning up and refining my PDF files I succeeded.
I did not necessarily memorize the exact process list for each of the I's or O's I memorized patterns of processes. So instead of memorizing 200 process / Outputs I memorized 13 patterns such as CR's output from all C* processes in the M&C group.
I would say that if anyone is interested in getting ahold of my PDF's I might be able to do that, but that would partially defeat the purpose. The effort put into actually writing it down (typing) and figuring out the relationships is probably 50% of the value. Listening to it 50 times, is the other 50%. But I still think that this process helped me out a lot as I am a verbal learner. (doing the formatting and editing to make the reader happy took a while to figure out)
I would be happy to help with providing more information if you are interested.
Good luck to everyone in the process of preparing for the exam.
