TOPIC: Passed PMP today; first attempt. Had trouble finding an effective study strategy but finally found one that worked

Apologies in advance for my long-winded tale but I am posting it in case someone finds it useful.

I passed the PMP exam today, with a score of “Above Target” in Planning, Executing, M&C and Closing and “Target” in Initiating.

Content
There were lots of Quality, Risk and ITTO questions. A few EVM questions (I took 10 minutes at the beginning of the exam to write out 40-odd formulas, ITTOs, flow and process notes and only referred to the list three times during the exam). Very much focused on what happens next from a particular point in the process.

Testing Center
Be sure to bring your earplugs in case you happen to test with a group of boisterous students taking their GREs. The exam room is quiet but the waiting room is noisy, especially if you're trying to do a bit of last-minute studying.

Exam interface
The strikeout feature that lets you cross out the answers you know are wrong was very handy. However, most of the exam questions had two answers that were very close and seemed like they could be right; it was difficult at times to know which one to choose.

My study strategy/experience

• 10 months/five hours a week (mostly without anything to show for it because I couldn’t retain the information)
• 1 week of diligent note-taking and PMBOK reading (mainly useless because I was taking notes and not digesting the information)
• 1 week of a new study approach that turned things around, and which I will describe below.

Source material

• Rita (skimmed)
• PM PrepCast (watched the first few sessions and then abandoned – too much detail too soon)
• Head First (skimmed and abandoned for the same reason)
• PMBOK (skimmed)
• Andy Crowe (skimmed)
• Aileen Ellis’ ebooks (“How to Get Every Earned Value Question Right on the PMP Exam” (excellent) and “PMP Exam: Simplified” (which I abandoned fairly quickly because I wasn’t sure I could trust it because it contained terminology from earlier versions of the PMBOK).

Practice exams

• PM Exam Simulator (Good, though some exam questions refer to terminology that wasn’t in PMBOK 5).
• BrainBok (Good – really hard questions – harder than what’s on the actual exam)

My story/lessons learned
I would say that up until last week, I had been going about studying the entirely wrong way. I spent months reading and taking notes that I intended to digest “later.” Truthfully, I like taking notes because it feels productive and by the end, I had literally hundreds of pages to show for it. Unfortunately, I never quite got around to reading those notes or digesting the material so it was pretty much a huge waste of time. Life has been incredibly hectic for the past year (new, extremely stressful job, disabled husband, an autism diagnosis for my son), and I have struggled to find time to study.

Over the past year, I have scheduled and rescheduled the exam at least six times. With the clock ticking, I scheduled it for today, two days before my eligibility period ends. I took two weeks’ vacation off work and spent 12 hours a day for the first week trying to digest the material. However, I still wasn’t getting it because I was doing the same thing – taking notes that I intended to read “closer to the exam” (or whenever the planets happened to align). Five days ago, however, I had an epiphany:

1. The reason I couldn’t absorb the material was because I was trying to rush through it so I could cross it off my “to-do” list.
2. All of the books I’d read and podcasts I’d listened to assume a baseline knowledge of the terminology that I didn’t have (although I’d been reading (ok, “skimming”) for almost a year, much of the terminology was still foreign to me).

I decided to start from the beginning, and that is what made the difference.

For those of you who feel like you just aren’t “getting it,” here’s my advice:

1. Study Table 3.1 (PMBOK 5) to get an overview of the processes. Don’t try to understand the processes. You’re just trying to familiarize yourself with the terminology.
2. Study the ITTOs provided in the Overview at the beginning of each chapter. Familiarize yourself with the terms, but don’t read for understanding.
3. Read the glossary at the back of the PMBOK. Read it carefully, two or three times.
4. Now that you have some understanding of the terminology, study the ITTOs at the beginning of each chapter again. This time, look for patterns and linkages, i.e., deliverables are “Deliverables” when they are inputs to Validate Scope, but they’re “Accepted Deliverables” when they come out. Write those patterns down.
5. Study the images that show the different tools and techniques in the PMBOK (e.g., Figure 8-7, which shows the Seven Basic Quality Tools). Take your time, and don’t stop until you’re able to tell a Pareto chart from a Scatter diagram. At this point, you don’t need to understand what they’re used for, only that they exist.
6. Study the process flow diagrams in the PMBOK, the ones that show how the inputs and outputs feed into one another.
7. Now that you’re more grounded in the domain, read Chapter 1 in the PMBOK and keep going until you’ve read the whole book.
8. As you read, make a list of important terms (no definitions; these are just to prompt your memory) and add any terms you think you might need to quickly recall during the exam (e.g., for Checksheet, you might write, “aka “Tally Sheet,” checklist, data gathering, Seven Basic Quality Tools, Pareto diagrams, used to identify defects and attributes data.”)
9. Start memorizing the terms from your glossary. Memorize five terms a day, and write them down every day.
10. Start memorizing the formulas and writing them down, especially when to use them, how they should be interpreted (e.g., what you should do to get your project back on track if your CPI is below one and your SPI is over one.)
11. Start memorizing the major inputs and outputs for each process. (I only had time to memorize a few but when I got to the exam and saw so many ITTO questions, I wished I had started doing this much earlier.)
12. Start memorizing the Tools and Techniques, when to use one over the other, etc.
13. Start taking practice tests. Write out your braindump before each exam so the experience mimics what your experience will be like on the real test day.
14. Don’t second-guess yourself; if you have a gut feeling that one answer is more right than another, go with it.

That’s it. Good luck!

Congrats!

Thank you, Dorothy. Very helpful for me. All the best for you. Dietmar

Congratulations! You are a Hero to have passed this difficult exam with your personal life challenges. Enjoy and good luck!!