Wednesday, November 11, 2020

PMP Live Lessons Success Story: Never Give Up, Victory is Right Around the Corner

By Vinny Dsilva, PMP

Introduction

I was introduced to the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification by one of my friends who was aspiring to take up the certification. After doing a bit of research myself, I was clear that I wanted to get certified as a PMP.

Having around 10 years of experience back then, I knew that PMP certification would really help me have an edge to my career. Without much delay, I registered for the classroom training sessions in March 2018.

First PMP Learning Experience

The decision was made; however, I was not completely aware of the hard work, dedication and the amount of time it will consume. Add to that, I have a full-time corporate job!

I was fortunate enough to have the classroom training session conducted by Satya sir. His immense knowledge about project management, right guidance and tips on how to prepare for the certification gave me the confidence to prepare. I would also recommend his PMP Exam prep book- I Want To Be A PMP. The questions after each chapter, plus the full-length questions really helps you to understand how the questions would come in the exam.

Own Study

I planned to spend a minimum of four hours every day. I would spend two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, with some additional hours during weekends. Believe me, four hours a day with a full-time job, is not easy but fear of failing again, was the only driving factor that pushed me to work harder.

I referred the below materials for my preparation;

PMP Live lessons–Guaranteed Pass, by Satya Narayan Dash
I Want To Be A PMP book, 2nd Edition, by Satya Narayan Dash
PMBOK® guide 6th edition, by Project Management Institute (PMI®)

Review – PMP Live Lessons

I gave my first attempt for the exam in October 2019 and did not qualify. Right then, I knew that the exam is not going to be easy. But I never wanted to give up. I immediately reached out to Satya sir.

He helped me to identify the weak areas and guided me on how to prepare for those. Post that, I purchased the PMP Live Lessons, which really helped me to improve my score.

I followed this approach while going through the Live Lessons:

I would start every chapter by going through the videos from the PMP live lesson and simultaneously make my own pointers/notes.
I check and go through the PMBOK guide after each video lesson.
I kept repeating this until I got familiar with each topic.

The smart cards, ITTO video exercises at the end of each chapter would test your knowledge on each chapter.

PMP Exam Experience

I scheduled my exam for 21st October, 2020. I opted for the centre-based testing and booked my slot at 8:00 AM. I reached the venue by 7:00 AM, however, due to COVID-19 precautions, I was only allowed to enter the premises by 7:30 AM. After completing all the formalities, I was allowed to start my exam. The entire experience was smooth and hassle free.

I planned this thing first: NOT to spend more than a minute on each question.

Types of Questions Faced

I was expecting any direct questions. And yes, very few questions were direct. However, most of the questions were situational, context based or indirect.
I also wasn’t expecting mathematical questions, however I got three problem solving questions from Cost management, which took some time and eventually I was running behind time.
Most of the questions were on:

Change Management
Risk Management and
Communications Management.

Make sure you read the question thoroughly and under it first. The answers can be tricky at times.

As I mentioned earlier, the biggest challenge I faced during the exam is keeping up with the time. I was left with only two seconds after I clicked the option for the last question. So please make sure you keep a close watch on the time.

When you see that Congratulations pops up on the screen, you realise that your hard work has paid off. There’s nothing more satisfying than that. You have to go through the process and earn the credential to feel and believe it.

Suggestions for PMP Aspirants

Dos

Plan well and make sure you adhere to the plan.
Revise and practice as much as you can.
Attempt full length questions. These will help you to plan your timings while attempting the exam.

Don’ts

Do not be take the examination and your preparation lightly. The exam is of high standard and the questions are tough.

Conclusion

The entire journey has been long. I would say perseverance is the key. As I wrote in the beginning: Never give up. If you believe you can, you will.

Brief Profile:
Vinny Dsilva, Senior Manager, PMP

I work as a Senior Manager, Clinical Data Management with close to 13 year of experience in Pharmaceutical sector.

PMP LIVE LESSONS - Guaranteed Pass:

PMP 35 Contact Hours Online Course:

PMP 35 Contact Hours Online: Full Money Back Guarantee

Book for PMP exam:

Book for PMP Exam Prep: "I Want To Be A PMP"

You may also like:

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Course Review: MS Project 2016 Live Lessons–An Effective Way to Learn Microsoft Project

By Naveen Kumar, PMP

Introduction

Although I have in the Project Management field for a long time and have been managing various projects, I never had any formal training on MS Project software tool. I wanted to sharpen my skills, after my PMP on this tool and equip myself with all the available features of this tool.

By gaining practical knowledge of this tool, I can now take full advantage of this tool to manage projects in my current role as a Program Manager. That is the reason why I decided to enrol for this course.

Why this Course?

This course is unique in the way that you can complete this online course in the comfort of your home and at your own pace. The training is quite comprehensive, detailed and with practical exercises for each and every topic. These practical exercises will really help you to actually master your skills in this tool usage.

Key Features

Although all the topics in the course are very informative, I liked reporting and analysing the project a lot.

Reporting: Reporting is very helpful in how we communicate the project progress to top management.

Project Analysis: Analysing project covers schedule compression techniques - Fast tracking, Crashing, Critical path analysis which are very helpful day to day project management.

Theory and Practical: This course has a blend of theory and practical. There is a detailed explanation of each and every feature of MS Project tool followed by quiz questions and practical exercises. This allows the user to check his or her existing knowledge post which the user can validate the result with the answers.

Conclusion

I highly recommend this course to anyone who would like to have a detailed and structured knowledge of the MS Project tool. I found this to be very helpful in my current role as a Program Manager. I would like to specially thank Satya for his dedicated efforts to create this course and spreading his knowledge to various Project managers. He has been really very helpful and approachable throughout the learning process.

Brief Profile:

Naveen Kumar, Senior Program Manager, PMP, 20 years of total experience primarily in Project Management field.

You may also like:

Articles on MS Project:

Saturday, November 07, 2020

Using Custom Fields and Project Functions in MS Project 2019 (1)

One very important and significant functionality available in MS Project 2019 is availability of various project functions which can be used with the custom fields. While for normal management work with MS Project, you may not need these fields, you may have to use them for some out-of-the-box thinking and applicability.

For example, you can use the fields, functions and operators to have:

Interpretation of TCPI in Earned Value Management (EVM),
Calculation of Estimate to Complete (ETC) in EVM,
Determining the cost variances and indications for exceeding the threshold
Determining the schedule variances and indications for exceeding the threshold
Finding out the tasks which can be crashed or best suitable to be crashed.

I’ve listed a few above. There can be many other real-world applications. For the below examples, I’ve used MS Project 2019. You may try with other versions.

Viewing Custom Fields

To know the custom fields, go to the Project tab – Properties group – Custom Fields command.

You can also see the available custom fields by:

Checking the Gantt Chart tools – Format tab – Columns group -- Custom Fields command.
Right clicking on any column on the tabular side of the view and choosing Custom Fields from there.

This will open up the “Custom Fields” dialog box as shown below.

Types of Custom Fields

The custom fields available can be “Task” related, “Resource” related or “Project” related as the dialog box shows.

Next, you can see that there are various types of custom fields.

Number custom fields: From Number1 to Number20
Duration custom fields: From Duration1 to Duration10
Cost custom fields: From Cost1 to Cost10
Date custom fields: From Date1 to Date10
Start custom fields: From Start1 to Start10
Finish custom fields: From Finish1 to Finish10
Flag custom fields: From Flag1 to Flag20
Text custom fields: From Tex1 to Tex30
Outline Code custom fields: From Outline Code1 to Outline Code10

As you can see there are over 100 custom fields which you can use as you plan for your project or program.

Among the custom fields, the most used ones will be the Number, Flag, Date, and Text custom fields. Date is another custom field, which is also highly likely to be used. I’ve not seen much usage of other custom fields, though Cost and Duration can be used for earned value measurement (EVM) and earned schedule measurement (ESM), respectively.

In fact, for earned schedule measurement, I’ve already used the custom fields before. You can read on it in the below link:

Earned Schedule Management (ESM) with MS Project 2019 Custom Fields

Formula Dialog Box

This is the most interesting part available in MS Project 2019, and you can have a plethora of formulas using the available normal fields as well as the custom fields.

To write your own formula, select the radio button next to “Formula” under “Custom Attributes” and then click on the Formula button. This will open up the “Formula” dialog box associated with the custom field.

As shown above, you can:

Enter the formula for in the formula area.
Enter the fields you want to associate by clicking on the “Field”.
Enter the functions you want to associate by clicking on “Function”.

Elements of Formula Dialog Box

The formula dialog box, as noted above, has primarily 3 elements – text area to write the formula, fields which can be used in the formula and functions which also can be used in the formula.

Above the fields and functions, you have various mathematical operators such as +, -, /, * and also logical operators such as AND, OR, NOT among others. This is shown in the below figure.

There are a number of fields available when you click on the drop down arrow of Insert: Field command. These fields include the custom fields. These are shown in the below figure.

Next to the Fields, you have Insert: Function command. With this command, you can insert any function or a set of functions as you want. Of course, you have to build the logic needed to have the final formula. The functions under “Conversion” are shown in the below figure.

For a management practitioner, the most used functions will be under “General”, “Date” and “Microsoft Project 2019” specific functions.

Practical Examples

Let’s take a few examples to understand the usage of formulas built with the help of fields and functions.

Question - 1: You want to show the task ID number along with a prepended string, informing on the followings:

Task type: A summary task or non-summary task
Task ID: The identifier value of the task.
WBS Outline level: The level, e.g., level 1 or level 2 of the WBS the task belongs.

An example string can be: “This is a summary task with Task ID 3. It's under WBS outline level of 2.”

Solution:

To have the solution, we will have the following steps:

Create a custom text field and rename it as “String Description”.
Next, we will open-up the formula dialog box and enter the following formula as shown in the below figure. This formula is concatenating multiple strings.

As shown above, in the formula, I’ve the followings:

It's a text field, which means it will have a string value.
I’ve taken the “Type” field to know on the task type and added it to the previous string. Type is a “Number” field and hence to convert to string, I’ve used the “CStr” function, i.e., CStr([Type]), which will convert the number into a string.
I’ve taken the “ID” field and again converted it to string using the CStr function. The ID field is under “ID/code”.
I’ve taken the “Outline Level” field and again converted it to string using the CStr function. The ID field is under “Number”.

The result is shown below along with the project plan. Remember to enable the “Use Formula” radio button so that the formula is applied.

Let’s interpret the result.

Task A1 is with Task ID 3 and it’s correctly shown in the above string. Similarly, for other tasks.
Task A1 is at Outline Level 3 and it’s correctly shown in the above string informing at outline level 3. Similarly, for other tasks.
Task A1 is a non-summary tasks and hence the value for [Type] is “0”. For summary tasks, the value for [Type] is “1”. These are also shown correctly.

However, it’s possible that you may want to show an enhance version of string, informing:

Task A1 is a non-summary task
Work Package-1 as a summary task.

This can be done with IF function, which MS Project 2019 notes as “IIF” and it’s under one of the functions under General category. We will know this function, along with others, in the next post.