PM Podcasts: PMP in the Real World

PMP in the Real World: Lessons Learned from the PMP Exam
A Podcast with Carl Pritchard, PMP

"I think we lose the lessons the exam teaches, and that actually causes us to stray from what is good project management."

Ask any prospective PMP why they're sitting for the exam, and you'll probably hear that the certification is "needed," "required," or "expected" for their career. You might hear similar language out of many certified PMPs. But what does the PMP exam offer beyond the letters?

When a certification becomes as widespread and important as the PMP has, people inevitably begin to question the relationship between the exam and real world practice. In this podcast, Carl Pritchard weighs in on key aspects of the PMP exam and why he considers it a source of valuable best practices for real world project managers.

What does it really take to be best-in-class?
Are signed charters actually practical in the real world, and do they really matter?
What does the exam teach us about the central premise of good WBS construction?
Can we really incorporate teambuilding into every meeting and still be taken seriously?

Carl's 50-minute podcast examines the central mindset of the PMP for those thinking of taking the exam, as well as those who took it years ago and thought the PMP was well behind them. In the process, he makes his case for the exam as more than an academic exercise. See the PMP exam through the eyes of one of project management's most noted authors and lecturers. See it as a source of meaningful, practical lessons, stuffed with things every project manager should be thinking about.

Excerpts from this podcast:

01:28 What does it take to truly be best-in-class? From the PMI perspective there's one simple frame of reference: consistency. How consistent are you? ...The whole idea is that every process should be repeatable. We should be able to identify what we did, how we did it, and importantly why we did it...

10:01 ...people are afraid of signatures ...I'm a signature zealot. I've said it before, and I really believe in signatures. Signatures are powerful tools. They're amazing things to reinforce the notion of consistency and getting people to sign off on virtually everything is an amazing way get buy in or at least to understand where buy-in does not exist.

12:30 ...After twenty minutes he asked me the magic question. He looked at me and he was very frustrated with me obviously, and he said, "Is this worth your job?" I'd never heard those words before. ...I had the first signed project charter in that organization, ever. I wielded that sucker like a knife!

31:50 ...when do you change the baseline? Some people are like, "Oh, any time there's a change." Wrong answer. ...We change the baseline only when there's a change so dramatic, so radical—so alarming!—that the original baseline no longer serves as a meaningful metric.

37:37 ...One of the other notions they espouse that people actually snicker at is the whole notion of ...every meeting should have some component of team building. ...I know there's at least one of you out there right now who's rolling your eyes right now ...But I don't think team building is what a lot of people have pumped it up to be. A lot of people look at team building any more and they tend to think of it as that old "If I were a tree what kind of tree would I be" kind of philosophy. That's not what teambuilding is.

44:22 That's the basic PMI exam philosophy: we learn the process, we follow the process, we do it to the letter. And yet all too often we think that's too time-consuming ...by the time we've found the short cuts we could have gone the straight line.

Meet the Producer

Carl Pritchard is a leading lecturer, author, researcher, and instructor. A recognized authority on risk management, he presents on a variety of management topics ranging from project essentials to the complexities of network diagramming and team motivation. More about Carl >

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