PMI-SP certification added to my CV

Yesterday, 8th Aug, I took the exam for the PMI-SP (Scheduling Professional) certification issued by PMI and I passed :)

Information of the exam that may be of your interest.

• 170 questions, 3,5 hours.
• There was one question with two answers exactly the same. It makes it easier because on can discard those immediately but it is the first time something like that comes across.
• There were many questions regarding Performance Reporting and some (more than I wanted/expected) were not specifically mentioned in the preparation material.
• I found some (3 or 4) mistakenly phrased questions. One was asking for techniques while all the possible answers were processes and other one was stating "project management plan" when it was actually meaning "project schedule".
• Earn Value Management and Network scheduling questions were not too complicated. Easy calculations, doable only understanding the concepts. Abbreviations BCWS, BCWP and ACWP were key in a couple of questions
• One always finds surprising questions like asking for the "typical" monthly meetings ... well, the only monthly even I have managed in my projects was the payroll / invoicing, everything else was weekly, at least.

About preparation, I took the "Preparation Course PMI-SP Exam", the archived version of it and it was fine. I even recommend the recorded version as it makes easier to follow the course, you can schedule :) breaks and sessions at your own pace. The written material, which includes "Practice Standard for Scheduling" was also sufficient.

The natural next step would be to go ahead with preparations for the PMI-RMP (Risk Management Professional) exam. But it will have to wait as I am focussed on my social media business and Bachbill. Maybe I will try to give some Project Management training.

Preparing PMI-SP certification

As a complement of the PMP (Project Management Professional) certification, PMI has created two more, namely, Scheduling Professional (SP) and Risk Management Professional, focussed on the respective knowledge areas.

While preparing the PMI-SP exam and taking a training course (delivered by IIL) for that purpose, I realized an important issue I would like to share.

Scheduling seems to be mostly related to Time and Cost Management areas and one can reasonably think they are the only chapters of the PMBok to study for the exam, beside "The Practice Standard for Scheduling" and I would like to point out that, although those chapters are key for the exam, there are some others related to Scheduling which must be reviewed as well: Integration, Scope, Human Resources, Communications and Risk Management.
Those knowledge areas are related to the project scheduling function as the required to be taken into account to create, analyse, maintain and report the project schedule.