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The ASPE Project Management Professional Boot Camp

Okay, I’ve decided to do it!  I’m attending the ASPE Project Management Professional (PMP)® Certification Exam Boot Camp in Denver, Colorado!  It is part of a twelve-city tour by ASPE, Inc. to educate and prepare would-be project managers for the PMP Exam.  Cool!

Wouldn’t it be neat to read the unbiased personal experiences of somebody who had been through the course before taking the plunge yourself?  That’s exactly what I’m offering in this series of blog posts.  You’ll get my unvarnished daily experiences of the entire PMP Prep seminar.  After reading them, you can decide if this is for you.  I expect to enjoy myself, so you probably will too.

I’ll be posting my personal experiences every day I attend.  You’ll get a firsthand look at the whole process: the course materials, the homework, the hardships, and the excitement along the way – everything one might expect when taking such a course to prepare for sitting the PMP exam hosted by PMI.  See links below to check out the ASPE course I’ll be taking.

Honestly at this point, I just have a sketchy view of the week ahead.  I sort-of know what to expect, but not exactly.  I’ve been doing project management for longer than I care to divulge, but have never taken the PMP exam, and never formally studied the disciplines of project management.  Of course, having worked in engineering shops since college, I know much of the terminology and probably apply the principles on a daily basis.  So I’m coming from a different perspective than those who may just be starting their careers.  Honestly, I wish I’d done this a long time ago, but it’s never too late to improve your career with training like this.

To prepare, I read through the ASPE PMP Boot Camp overview and course outline (see link below).  I learned that there are four very full days of coursework – from 8 AM to 6 PM.  (I’m expecting to drink from a fire hose.)  The course outline lists 68 topics grouped into 8 areas.  We’ll cover such lofty subjects as Project Management Overview, The Project Management Life Cycle, The Knowledge Areas, The Elements of Project Management, The PMP Exam, The PMP Certification, and The Credentials.

After finishing the course, they say 97% of ASPE students pass the PMP examination.  That’s reassuring.  It probably means I could too!

The cost is $2,395.  Honestly, I think that’s a small price to pay to advance your career.  I mean really… if you plan to spend any time around projects for next forty years, this is probably a good idea – it doesn’t matter what your role is.  You’ll certainly earn it all back, especially since it launches you on a fast-track to higher management positions.  And PMI claims a PMP certification it directly impacts your salary.  Who doesn’t want that?  This little-understood fact is a big deal for career advancement:  Get all the training you can handle.  And get it early in your career!

Helpful links:

http://www.aspe-sdlc.com/courses/pmp-boot-camp/

http://www.pmi.org/certification/project-management-professional-pmp.aspx

http://www.projectteamblog.com/?p=239

Links to previous ASPE PMP Boot Camp posts

 

Disclaimer: The thoughts and feedback for the ASPE PMP Certification Exam Boot Camp associated with this series of posts are my own.  In exchange for providing my feedback on this community forum, ASPE has provided benefits related to my course attendance.

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Define: Fixed Duration, Fixed Units, Fixed Work

Fixed Duration: The task calendar ‘Duration’ will not change when you change the ‘Work’ or add resources.

Fixed Units: The resource percentage of work will not change when you change the task ‘Duration’ or ‘Work’ hours.
Fixed Work: The ‘Work’ hours will not change when you change the ‘Duration’ or percentage of resource work.

Double-click on a Microsoft Project task to display the dialog box below. The field we’re describing is highlighted below: ‘Task type’.

Task Properties

The default setting for ‘Task type’ is Fixed Units. That means the percentage of resource work (Example: “Buzz[50%]”) doesn’t change when you enter a new number for the work hours. For instance, if Buzz is set to work 50% of his time, changing the amount of work won’t change that. He will still work 50% of his time.

Changing the ‘Task type’ to Fixed Duration causes the Duration field to not change when you enter ‘Work’ hours.

Changing the ‘Task type’ to Fixed Work means that the Work field won’t change when you update the other two fields.

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Hook a Timesheet to MS Project

PMO’s and project managers, have you ever considered hooking a timesheet to your MS Project MPP file? You spend a good deal of time pouring over your MS Project files, scheduling tasks, and assigning hours, but are you ignoring the ‘Actual Work’ field?

Do you have an automated way to input actual work?

Hooking a timesheet to the Actual Work field turns your static project schedule into a living, breathing document. You’re now releasing the beast into the wild, and you might be surprised at what it turns into! What, exactly, does that mean to release the schedule into the wild? It means letting employees enter their own actual work against their own tasks. It means hooking a timesheet to your project schedule. See this timesheet program for an example.

 

Getting actual working hours from employees might completely surprise you. Many project managers are uncertain how long tasks take. They have a good intellectual guess, or even some estimates from the actual engineers on the ground, but actual hours from employees can be a huge eye-opener. They are almost never what you expect. Project tasks often double or triple from their initial baseline estimate. No kidding! And when that begins to happen on a regular basis, panic sets in! You now have to either rein back your initial proposal or force employees to be more efficient.

See what I mean by setting the beast lose in the wild?

When engineers blow past your estimates, or even their own, they have no particular malice in mind. They are just doing their jobs. They may have no idea how those bloated task hours fit into a larger picture, or how they may affect a static project schedule. Again, they are just doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. And if that means a little extra work, then so be it. Problem is, stakeholders and project managers are freaking out as the schedule blows up. I once heard a manager say, “At this rate, we can only do a quarter of what we hoped.” That’s project management panic!

So back to hooking a timesheet to your MPP file… Sure, panic may set in for a while. You may need to rethink your plan. But you’ll be much more educated than if you had left the schedule in an “open loop” system without actual hours from employees. Ignorance is bliss!

A timesheet is the best thing ever invented for a project plan. They are so closely related, they should be in the same package! Fortunately, with this timesheet app, they are. In fact, you don’t even need MS Project. You can create your own project schedules with full hierarchy and project tasks, and then track time to them. You’ll instantly compare estimates with actuals, and avert most of the panic associated with a blown schedule.

Getting “Actual Work” feedback early is the best answer to project management panic!

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Three Reasons to Track Project Time

Time tracking, for the purposes of project management, is an overhead some companies are not willing to undertake.  (Read this as an exploitable mistake!)  We all know that some level of administrative overhead is necessary to maintain a healthy organization.  And some level of process or methodology is also necessary.  In this article, I’m suggesting that time tracking should be part of that process.

There are three primary reasons to track project time that apply to all organizations.  It matters nothing whether your company is a consultancy, manufacturer, government agency, non-profit, or otherwise.  Time tracking is valuable to all.  Here are the top three reasons to track project time.   1) Reduce budget overruns, 2) Prioritize projects, and 3) Learn your own business.

I’ll discuss these three project tracking benefits in detail.  Feel free to skip to the ones that interest you most.

1) Reduce Budget Overruns
Human beings are curiously bad with two things: time and money.  A huge number of cottage industries are built around helping people manage time and money.  Why?  Because almost every one of us does it badly.  Admit it… your bank account scrapes bottom almost every month.  And you’re late for at least one event per month.  That’s so easy to predict, I don’t even have to know you to feel confident in its reach.  Everyone suffers from the same poor time and financial accounting.

Unfortunately, we carry those same poor principles into our work life.  I’ll venture to guess that your boss, and his boss above him, is also a poor manager of his personal time and money.  Just because he’s a boss, doesn’t mean he’s any better at time management, or money management, than you are.  We’re all crap.

But if you’ll just subject yourself to a little time tracking discipline, you can avert the most common budget overruns.  It’s the low-hanging fruit you’ve heard so much about.  Just track the time you spend.  That time translates into salaries.  Now you know the project cost.  Don’t spend more than you take in.  Simple.

I know a great time tracking product for this.  It’s named Standard Time.  Click here for Timesheet and Time Tracking Software.  You can install this on everyone’s workstations, and start tracking project time.
You’ll see why it’s important in the next two reasons to track time.

2) Prioritize Projects
Instinctively, you know which projects are strategically important to your company.  You know which ones represent a strategic investment that will pay off big-time in the future.  Even the lowest employee knows that.  (Although it’s the company executives that should enforce the participation in such projects.)  So, are they doing that?  Are you doing that?  (Hint: if you’re a low or mid-level manager, here’s your chance to advance:  Talk “strategic projects” at every meeting.)

“Secondary projects” are nice to do when you’ve got time and money to burn.  Have you got time and money to burn?  If not, you must focus on the strategic projects.  They’re the only ones that make money and keep people employed.  And how, exactly, do you do that?  You track time to them!

Collect all your hours for every project you work on, and then run a report that shows you which projects are getting the most time.  You might be surprised!  Even better, categorized your projects as “strategic” and “non-strategic” and run the report again.  Which category is getting the most time?  Are you surprised yet?

If you’ve already downloaded Standard Time (see link above), you can get all these reports for free.

3) Learn Your Own Business
Last thing: learn your own business (LYOB).  It takes 2 -3 years to really learn a business.  You may have a good guess within your first six months of employment, but you won’t truly know it for another two years!  Tracking your project time chops a year off that.  Here’s why:

When you track time to company projects, you learn what makes them efficient, and what makes them inefficient.  You learn the gritty details because you see everything that goes into the work you do.  My advice: pour over the descriptions in every time log entered by every employee.  Submit yourself to the excruciating pain of studying these details.  You’ll perfectly hate it!

But even as you hate it, you’ll love it.  You’ll become an expert on your business and will soon have the information you need to make improvements.  Time tracking provides the information you need.

Best Time Tracking Program

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Define: Work Contour

Work Contour: The distribution (or “shape”) of working hours over the duration of a task.

In Microsoft Project, working hours are not always spread across the duration of a task like peanut butter.  In other words, they don’t have to be evenly distributed.  They can front-loaded so that most of the work is performed at the beginning of the task.  Or, they could be back-loaded, to represent most of the work being performed at the end of the task.  In fact, there are several choices for the Work Contour.

 

Here they are:

  1. Flat
  2. Back-loaded
  3. Front-loaded
  4. Double peak
  5. Early peak
  6. Late peak
  7. Bell
  8. Turtle

 

The images below illustrate how to choose the Work Contour for each resource in each task.

First, choose View, Gantt Chart to create tasks and assign resources to them.  Then set the duration.

 

Next, choose View, Task Usage.  Insert the ‘Work Contour” column.  After choosing various contours for each resource, you will see an icon representing the distribution of hours across the task.  Notice how the front-loaded task has most of the hour distributed in the first few days while the back-loaded contour has them distributed at the final days.  Flat distribution is default.  It simply uses the resource schedule.

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Language and Terminology of PMI

Planning to take the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam from Project Management Institute? Excellent move! That’s just the right medicine for today’s tight economy. You might even find that your position depends upon it. I hope that’s not true, but I’ve seen it happen.

I found an interesting way to prep for the PMP exam plus get a working knowledge of the language and terminology used in the PMP exam. There’s a North Carolina-based company with PMP and Agile instructors that set up classroom sessions around the country: ASPE-SDLC training. Of course, they also have online classes. You can contact them at http://www.aspe-sdlc.com/ and see the PMP Boot Camp class at http://www.aspe-sdlc.com/courses/pmp-boot-camp/.

I’m considering taking the class to sharpen up my own seat-of-the-pants PM skills. If I do, I’ll blog the daily experience here on Project Team Blog. You hear all the ‘torture’ I’ve been subject to.  But you’ll also get an honest day-by-day account of the course. After all that, you might consider taking the course yourself.

Stay tuned!

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Define: Project Baseline

Project Baseline: A copy of the project tasks as they were at some point in time, which you can refer to at a later date.

Here is an example of two project tasks immediately after setting the project baseline.  Notice that the ‘Baseline 1 Work’ field has been copied from the ‘Work’ field.  As the ‘Work’ field changes throughout the project, the baseline is still available for comparison.  How did we do this?  Easy.  Just choose Tools, Tracking, Set Baseline within Microsoft Project.

Here we see the ‘Work’ field changed and the ‘Baseline’ unchanged.

 

Want an easier solution?
Baselining can be complicated and confusing, so “Sir Ganttalot” (a YouTube celebrity) has come up with an easy alternative.  Click here to see the YouTube video:

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7BJ6%5F1pcgc

Essentially, Ganttalot creates a customized field named “Finish Date Changed” to identify tasks that have changed.  Graphical arrow indicators tell whether a finish date has slipped in the future or has tightened up.  These graphical indicators are easier to spot than comparing textual finish dates to baseline finish dates.  It shows you at-a-glance what’s changed from week to week.  Slick, I’d say!

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Define: Timephased

Timephased: Total project task hours distributed over a period of time.

An example from Microsoft Project of this is shown below.  The hours for each project task are distributed over the duration of each task.  The hours per day is the ‘Work’ field divided by ‘Duration’ field.  In other words, the total work is spread evenly over the duration.  Choose the Microsoft Project views below to see these task layouts.

 

Tracking Gantt View:
 

 

Task Usage View:
 

You can see that the 100 hours are timephased over 10 days for the first task, and over 1 day on the second task.

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MS Project Overallocation

Assigning a project resource to a task by percentage alleviates the problem of overallocation.  Below are two project tasks assigned to the same time period.  If they both must be completed, you have an over-allocation problem.  Over-allocation simply means that the person has been assigned too much work to perform in a given time period.  In all likelihood, they will not be able to complete the work.

 

 

Choose View, Resource Graph in MS Project to see the problem  Red bars mean the resource is overallocated for that time period.  In this case, there is double the work that is reasonably expected from the project team member.  So how do you fix that?

 

 

Here’s how to solve it:  Assign the resource to work only 50% of their hours on each task.  Assigning project team members a certain percentage of their hours reflects the likely situation on the ground.  Hald their time goes to one task and half to the other.  Let the resource figure out when to actually perform the work.

 

 

This is the new resulting project resource allocation graph.  It shows that the resource is fully allocated to 100%.

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Seven Days in Utopia

The movie Seven Days in Utopia is clearly not up to Robert Duvall’s standards.  The story points were awkward and difficult to decipher.  One-shot git-er-done scenes and Karate Kid theme didn’t help.  But I managed to scrape out the movie’s arc and purpose.  It’s about faith and trust in God… and a little golf thrown in.

Buried in the poor directing was a principle that resonated with me.  Duvall’s character says, “The game of golf is about conviction.”  He continues with, “Watch out for that random idea that comes at you, that will throw you right out of your game.  Without conviction, it will make you question your game and shake your confidence.  Without confidence, you cannot win.”

It occurred to me that project management is exactly like that.  Without a clear strategy that rests on bedrock conviction, random ideas from so-called experts will shake your confidence.  You’ll chase a dozen “great ideas” from outsiders and never execute your strategy.  Although while that’s true, you must still remain open to new input.  It’s a touchy game.

Moral of the story: Develop a solid project strategy and hold your confidence.  Follow through with confidence.