1. Read the PMBoK 4th edition two to three times before taking the exam. In that, use mind mapping to take notes, once. On scope, quality and procurement knowledge areas, there will be some questions straight from inputs / tools and techniques / output; In risk management the order of events (the process flow) is important; etc. So reading PMBoK is crucial. If you can get someone to explain PMBoK concepts, from begin to end, with illustrations, you should grab that opportunity. Technical documents can be boring to read by yourselves.
Sethuramalingam was my colleague in CSC. He has 13+ years of experience in IT industry predominantly as a quality consultant. He is PMP, CSQA and ITIL certified. He has handled lead quality positions in large programs. He is an expert in CMMI. Today he is sharing his thoughts on what it takes to be an effective manager.
Manager Vs Damager
Manager is not simply the person who gets things done. He / She should possess multi faceted skills and traits. Important among them are
(Come to the blog to see the greeting card) BTW Next free PMP orientation program - 8th Jan, Next PMP boot camp – 22,23,29 and 30 Jan
By God’s grace, we had 27 PMs participating the December month PMP boot camp. They were from IBM, HCL, Wipro, Visteon, Patni, Cognizant, Dell, PayPal, Verizon, Frost and Sullivan, BWIR, TelcorIndia, 3i infotech, and Lycos.
When I founded MS Academy in December 2009, I thought I will give myself one year to evaluate the results from the venture. At the end of November 2010, when I took stock, I was happy with the impact we made in the market, especially the terrific positive impact on the confidence level of the Project Managers who attended our training programs, but the bottom line from a business view was not very encouraging.
As I said in my last blog, PMI has made getting and reporting PDUs simpler. They had 18 PDU categories which has been reduced to just 6 categories. 3 categories in ‘Education’ and 3 in ‘Giving back to the profession’. You can see details here Revised PMI PDU categories
What interests me as an educator is this section below.
Continuing Education
- By completing an academic course being offered by a university or college OR
Many of us bloggers, wanted PMI to recognize authoring Project Management articles in blogs (like this one) through PDUs. In fact we would settle only if they mention the very term ‘BLOG’ in their CCR (Continuing certification requirements) documentation. Finally it has happened. PMI is revising their PDU categories. They had 18 PDU categories which has been reduced to just 6 categories. 3 categories in ‘Education’ and 3 in ‘Giving back to the profession’. You can see details here Revised PMI PDU categories The place where they have mentioned ‘BLOG’ is category D.CATEGORY D:
In his book ‘High performance entrepreneur’ Subroto Bagchi talks about six areas in which a company should differentiate their service, product from the already existing competitors. The six areas are 1. Domain 2. Tools 3.Methodology 4.quality 5.Innovation and 6.Branding.
I feel that every Project Manager can differentiate themselves in these 6 areas.
Let me elaborate.
Hope you got a glimpse of the new MS Academy PMP Question bank online.
The Nov month PMP boot camp went well with 12 PMs participating this time. They were from HP, CA Technologies, HCL, TCS, Paypal, Enoah, Symantec, iNautix, Softcrylic and Vlinksys. I invited Mr.Balajee Viswanath who is a senior software project manager, currently leading the PMO efforts at Visteon Software to hand over the certificates. Balajee attended the MS Academy PMP boot camp in October and cleared PMP within 10 days from course completion. He shared tips on how to prepare for PMP exam. He recommended that the participants take all elements of the boot camp like EZ Dump, Baseline tests, stretching exercise etc. seriously, attempt a few question banks after the boot camp and just go give the exam with confidence.
Save Paper Save Trees Save Earth. Please don’t print this e-mail unless you really need to.
Some of you could have noticed this sentence in our email signature. But we were printing at least a 1000 sheets to administer tests in our PMP training program every month. We wanted to go green and so we explored options to conduct our PMP baseline tests online. Some of our students suggested moodle !Lo and behold! we have an MS Academy PMP Question bank online.
In the last post, we touched upon ‘Why Mind Mapping’; In this post, let me give you some pointers to the question ‘How to do Mind Mapping?’
1. Start with few easy scenarios to do Mind Mapping
Mind Mapping can be used in several different ways. It could range anywhere from presenting your bio-data to summarizing a book. However, till one could appreciate the power of Mind Map the following activities could be a good place to start:
In the context of PMBoK, I had only learnt about the different leadership styles that I discussed in the last post. In the Laserwords PMP program, Mr.Chandra Kalluri VP-HR, Laserwords explained the concept “situational leadership styles”. He gave examples on how depending on your employees’ competences in their task areas and commitment to the task, the leadership style of PM may vary from one person to another. PMs may also lead the same person one way sometimes and another way at other times. I guess the picture on the top explains it well. You can also think of when you have used a directing vs coaching vs supporting vs delegating / empowering style to manage people and tasks.
O.S.Balaji sent me this deepavali greeting. Let me also wish you all a happy and prosperous deepavali through this creative card.
As a PM, even after you organize work as project and plan for everything including risk responses, the success of the project highly depends on how much you can convince your team to work for you and align them towards the goals you set. This is where leadership skills and styles come into play. Theorists propose that there are three type of leaders
