How to prepare for the PMP® exam if you are a startup project manager
Certified as a Project Management Professional, sounds good, right?
After having managed projects for more than 6 years, I embarked on the journey to take the PMP® exam with a lot of confidence and believing it is a matter of 4h / week for 4 weeks.
Depending on your experience, it could be exactly that. If you have experience in managing complex projects, building airplanes or heavy machinery in an established project organization with a defined PMO office and 100s of project managers, you might be able to take this exam with closed eyes.
If you work in a dynamic tech startup, the PMP® questions and guidelines may seem counter-intuitive at first.
If, like me, you work in a highly dynamic tech startup where scope creep used to be the norm because it was synonymous to innovation and building better solutions with the fresh user insights we just discovered, studying for the exam can be counter-intuitive as it might contradict to your everyday reality.
While PMI (the organization that overlooks the certification and updates the PMBOK) clearly shares that adaptation of the recognized practices is crucial to the success of your projects, when you sit for the exam, you need to know what the recommended best practice is.
For example, in the online test shared by PMI (you need to be registered to PMI), I made a mistake on the following question: "A project manager learns that a senior manager asked a team member for project information. What should the project manager do?"
A: Review the communication management plan (correct)
B: Invite the senior manager to the next project meeting
C: Refer to the stakeholder register (my answer)
D: Review the project management information system
In my way of working, the quick and efficient action would be to check what the expectations of the stakeholder are, what level of information could be most appropriate to him, and simply providing him the information asked. However, the correct thing to do from PMI perspective would be to review the communication management plan to make sure all appropriate messages are shared to all appropriate stakeholders at all time and that the situation doesn't happen again. Which makes sense in a large organization where you may not even personally know all your stakeholders.
So what should you do if you really, really, really want this certificate next to your diplomas, while you don't want to jeopardize your flexible working style?
Here is the selection of resources that helped me improve my test practice score from ~50% to ~85% correct answers with focused learning of ~6 hours per week for the last 8 weeks. I am preparing for the current version of the PMP exam, please note that the test will change on 2 January 2021.
The online course to prepare for the PMP®
Sandra Mitchell's Cert Prep: Project Management Professional (PMP)®
In around 10 hours of learning, you will cover the "Bible of Project Management" — the PMBOK — from cover to cover. The course is dynamic, concise, with some great quizzes at the end of each chapter, and a great set of PDF handouts to keep for your reference. Sweet bonus — it allows you to cover the 35 contact hours study requirement to qualify for the PMP exam.
Online practice tests
A full length 200-questions mock exam which is referred as the one closest to the real exam (the example question above is from this practice exam).
Oliver Lehmann free sample PMP® questions
This one is known to be more complex than the real exam, so don't get discouraged if you get a low score.
The ultimate site
Edward Chung's collection of 47 easily confused PMP terms
This is treasure for PMP® candidates who work in an environment where results matter more than precise usage of terms and it helped me immensely in understanding the different type of risk responses. He has a HUGE collection of useful resources on his site, including all his study notes — I cannot recommend his website more.
Mobile App
PMP® Exam 2020 (iPhone, Android)
This one is rich, very rich — it has 1600 questions divided by knowledge areas or fit within full-length exams. What I love is you can follow your progress (helps with motivation) and easily review what you didn't get right the first time (great for effective learning).
What I love about those resources is that they are effective, they are based on strong learning principles, and they are logical. Thank you for reading and if you are preparing for the exam, good luck!
