Practical Advice in Pursuing the Project Management Professional (PMP) Credential

Recently, I became a Project Management Professional (PMP) credential holder. I personally find the exam tough and the entire process stringent. Thus, I consider this achievement a milestone in my career.

In this blog, I will give advice, based on my own experience, how one can maximize the effort, and financial resources required to achieve the credential.

Just recently somebody asked me what my foremost advice would be if someone is seriously working into achieving the PMP certification. My foremost advice is also the most obvious.

1. Become a member of Project Management Institute (PMI). The benefits of membership are numerous. First, you get an immediate savings of approximately $10.00 in your application fee. The application fee for CBT (Computer Based Test) is $405 for members, and $555 for non members. To become a member, you are charged some $140 membership fee. Thus, in all, a new PMI member PMP applicant is charged $545, versus $555 for non-members. BUT (the big BUT), as a member you get free access to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBok), latest edition, which is the basis of 90% of the PMP exam questions. Also, as a PMI member, you get access to the MyPMI dashboard (a portion of which is shown above). The dashboard makes it easy for you to apply for the credential online. Applying online is a big relief. PMI requires you to fulfill 4,500 project hours for degree holders, or 7,500 project hours for secondary school (high school) diploma holders. These project hours should have spanned all five process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, closing); and they have to be non-overlapping. These hours also need to be logged for each project, and confirmed by your direct supervisor. 


I had a colleague who did the project hours logging using PMI paper forms. They are tedious, and tend to be messy. . The online application form is cleaner (shown in the right), and makes it easier for you to track if you already reached the required number of hours to apply for the credential. 

Which brings me to my next advice.

2. Make sure to log your project hours accurately, and discuss the project description with your manager.  The application process allows for certain liberties, after all the project hours are estimations. But if your application is selected for audit, your manager will be required to confirm (by a signature, with comments on a sealed envelop) your application - particularly the project hours, duration, and description. This also means... 

Compelling Scoreboards Do Keep Projects on Track

Technology management involves liberal amounts of  project management. Like construction engineers and architects, we Technology Managers often find ourselves being asked to design technology solutions, and implementing these. But for most of us, driving projects to be completed on time, and within cost has proven challenging - especially in this era where most technology projects are implemented by vendors and outsourced partners.

Throughout the years, I found out that keeping a compelling scoreboard of the project not only helps me, as the Project Manager, keep track of its progress, but also elicits commitment from the implementing team, vendors included. It also helps in communicating the project's progress to other stakeholders (i.e. executives, other departments) easier. Keeping a compelling scoreboard is extolled as discipline three in FranklinCovey Institute's Four Discpline of Execution (4DX). While 4DX's approach is utilitarian and practicable, scoreboards (or dashboards) is not unique to 4DX. It is also espoused in various management cases and thesis (i.e. Project Management Institute, Balanced Scorecard, etc.). Although, it is in 4DX where the case of "scoreboards should be compelling", is consistently made.

Take the snapshot of the simple  project management scoreboard below as an example. The template for this can also be downloaded (link provided below) to help you start your own scoreboard for your projects.

All effective scoreboards should follow the following characteristics:

Build or Buy Analysis: Determining the True Cost of Software Development vs. Ready Made Solutions

When faced with options to whether to build an IT system; or, to lease or subscribe to ready-made cloud-based solutions; most of us do what we were taught in management school. We open our poignant excel workbook, and compute the cost of the application by estimating materials and person-hours required to complete the project.

We do this by first forecasting the number of person-hours it would take to build the system.  Then we put a certain monetary value to these person-hours, which is usually the average salary of the software engineers that will be hired to build the system plus a little overhead. We then put all the other necessary materials to finish the system such as cost of servers, peripherals, etc.

We then estimate the yearly cost of maintaining the system, which we usually approximate at 20% of the initial build cost. After which we pick a discounting rate ranging from 8% to 12% (10% is usually the sweet spot), and do a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the system from year 0 (today) to year 4. We top it off by adding another 10%-20% contingency reserve margin to cover for ‘other unseen costs’.

After doing all that, we go window-shopping.  We go through a list of cloud-based solutions and ask them for their subscription costs. We compare the yearly subscription cost for cloud-based solution A, B, C…. and the cost of building the system.  Finally, we are ready to make a decision:  do we develop our own custom application, or do we lease or subscribe to Software as a Service (SAAS) solutions?

If this is how you do decision analyses, I encourage you to look at the past 5-10 build-or-buy decisions you made. You will find yourself that often you decided to build the application either in-house; or, using outsourced development partners. Rarely (perhaps 10% or even less probability), have you decide in favor of cloud-based solutions.