Just Get PMP

PMI requires its PMP credential holders to continue their educational and professional development. So, you cannot stop after achieving your PMP credential. You still need to continue to upgrade yourself to keep the hard earned PMP credential.

Continuing Certification Requirements System
The PMP credential has to be renewed once every three years. During this three year period, a PMP credential holder is expected to accumulate 60 Professional Development Units (PDUs). Each PDU is equivalent to one hour of learning.

There are five different ways to earn your PDUs:
(1) Continuing education
(2) Self-directed learning
(3) Creating new project management knowledge
(4) Volunteer service
(5) Working as a professional in project management

International Institute for Learning
As I have written earlier, the International Project Management (IPM) Day is celebrated on the first Thursday of November every year. This year, IIL (International Institute for Learning) has put together an exciting program featuring a wide range of experts and thought leaders from the project management profession to share their knowledge through recorded video presentations.


Earn 15 PDUs for FREE
If you are interested in earning 15 PDUs to help in maintaining your PMP credential, then you can register at the IIL web site for FREE: International Project Management Day: Power of the Profession. This year's event will be available for viewing until December 31, 2012.

To claim 5 PDUs, you are required to watch a minimum of 10 presentations of your choice.
To claim 10 PDUs, you are required to watch a minimum of 20 presentations of your choice.
To claim 15 PDUs, you are required to watch a minimum of 30 presentations of your choice.

Hope you will use this opportunity to collect some useful PDUs. What other ways do you earn your PDUs? Why don't you share it with us?

PMI has started taking advance orders for the Fifth Edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). I will refer this edition as PMBOK - Fifth Edition (or shortly PMBOK5) from now on in this article. PMI will be publishing the new edition in early January 2013.

Effective date of the changes
The PMP exam will be based on PMBOK - Fourth Edition until 31 July 2013. If you are appearing for the exam after 31 July 2013, you have to study based on the updated PMBOK - Fifth Edition.

What are the major changes expected?
1. A 10th Knowledge Area has been added and it will be known as Project Stakeholder Management.

2. Four new planning processes have been added:
Plan Scope Management
Plan Schedule Management
Plan Cost Management and
Plan Stakeholder Management

These four processes are included to reinforce the concept that each major Knowledge Area has a planning process focusing on how that area will be planned and executed. Including these planning processes also clears the inconsistency noted in PMBOK4 where certain management plans were not explicitly shown as outputs of any process.

I will discuss, in detail, about all the changes in PMBOK5 once PMI officially releases a copy.

How does the new version affect me?
I categorize the readers here into the following groups:

Category 1: Completed 35 hours PDU & scheduled the exam already; but, yet to take the exam
If you are in Category 1, please go ahead and complete the exam. Don't bother too much about the upcoming changes in PMBOK5. Your focus should be on PMBOK4 and clearing it on your first try. You have no time to play with. Don't mess it around; prepare well for the exam. Would like to know how I passed my PMP exam in first attempt?

Category 2: Just completed 35 hours PDU and awaiting to schedule the exam
If you are in Category 2, don't waste time. Quickly schedule your exam. The exam dates might become very difficult to get as you get closer to 31 July 2013. And, once again, you should prepare well to hit bulls eye on your first shot. Time is not with you.

Category 3: I am still in the research stage; yet to decide when to go for it
Time to take a decision. You have a choice to make. Rush for the established and well known PMBOK4 (or) wait for about 9 months to a year so that PMBOK5 becomes stable and you have enough materials for your exam preparation. If you would like to get the PMP quickly, go for the PMP training at the earliest (I suggest by this month). The more you delay, it would be difficult for you to appear for the exam based on PMBOK 4.

If you need further details on the above changes (or) if you are interested in any training for PMP examination, you can contact me at manick.pmp@gmail.com.

I wanted to create this picture to show you clearly the transition of deliverable to final product, service or result within the project management context.

1. Deliverables are created as part of the "Direct and Manage Project Execution" process. As you would expect, the deliverables are outputs of the Execution process group.


2. The deliverable, thus created during project execution, is fed as input to the "Perform Quality Control" process in Monitoring & Controlling process group. Necessary quality control checks are carried out to ensure that the deliverable meet the requirements. At the end of the process, we get the Validated deliverable as an output.


3. The validated deliverable is sent as an input to the "Verify Scope" process. Here, the client/ customer inspects the deliverable and accepts them. As such, the output of this process is the accepted deliverable. The major difference between "Perform Quality Control" and "Verify Scope" is that generally quality control is performed internally within the performing organization while verify scope is performed with the client/ customer. They may be done sequentially or sometimes concurrently.


4. Finally, the accepted deliverable is sent as an input to the "Close project or phase" process in the Closing process group; and the output is Final product, service or result transition. This refers to the acceptance of the final product, service, or result and the turnover of the product to the organization. This usually requires a formal sign-off to indicate that the product is accepted by the customer.