The ENCORE! More intense more funfilled!

The successful completion of the first batch of PMP was followed by an Encore! More colleagues signed up for the second round of the PMP workshop!

The workshop had a very diverse group of participants! Participants, on one hand, with several years of management experience and wondering(at least initially) if they need another workshop on Project Management, were sitting with colleagues with very little exposure to project management(perhaps not yet eligible for PMP, but may be eligible for CAPM).

Having participants with a very diverse range of experience is always a challenge for a trainer - in terms of class dynamics - balancing the needs of the lesser experienced participants with the availability of time, as well as, keeping the session interesting for the more experienced participants.

The workshop was nevertheless a huge success with both novice and experienced managers!

Some of the senior managers, apart from sharing their experiences, showcased their actual project documents(project charter, affinity diagram) to the colleagues, to reinforce the concepts of the PMBOK. This was also an opportunity for them, to plug gaps in knowledge areas they had not been exposed to, like procurement management.

For the relatively new managers, the course was a window to the formal discipline of Project Management! What they lacked in experience, they made up with their enthusiasm- they ensured that they cleared their doubts by actively participating and asking questions at every stage!

Some of the participants had enrolled for the program not sure if they would actually take up the PMP certification- perhaps few of them would not yet be eligible given their lack of actual Project Management experience. However, this did not prevent them from adding significant learning for themselves! They are sure they would be actively applying, at least some of the lessons of the workshop in their day-to-day professional life!

As always, we all had a great time!

Celtem's PMP Preparation Workshop

Celtem has been conducting Project Management and PMP preparatory workshops for several years, this however is our first blog series about our workshops.

In this series of blogs, we will be talking about our approach to Project Management training, the challenges that we see for the participants and for us as trainers and the various training best practices and tools that we employ for making the training experience worthwhile for the participants.

PMP Preparatory Workshop - Yet Another Project Management Training!

Participants being working professionals with serious responsibilities, sometimes end up at our workshop due to their organization’s mandate. Each day spent away for training means extra work for them- because responsibilities as Project Manager don’t go down while they are in the classroom; work does not stop and day-to-day problems still have to attended to; This usually means extra stress on the Project Managers! Some of the more experienced Project Managers are outright skeptic as to why they need this certification in the first place!

PMP workshop is not a beginners program! It is a certification for practicing Project Managers and Managers of Project Managers! One of the central objectives of PMP is to ensure that the PM community across the world has unified view of the practices of this trade and speak a fairly uniform language!

I remember a long time back, as a new project manager and not yet certified, one of my Senior Managers, who had just joined my company, asking me ‘Is the WBS ready for your project?’. I had never heard or used WBS? Now I realize that some of the documents that we had been working on, very closely resembled what could have been a proper WBS for the project!

So regardless of your seniority and designation – I feel all managers within ‘projectised organizations’ should work towards their PMP certification!

This is our ‘Project Managers’ community – we need to be part of it!

Also, choosing the right training partner i.e. faculty who bring serious Project Management experience, can make the 35 hours spent worthwhile for the participants! Or else you can end up in a workshop just going through the Input-Output sections of each PM Process - and 35 hours of Input-Output can look like a very very boring, endless and wasteful exercise!

Its not impossible to pass the exam without fully grasping the spirit of the PMBOK- this of course would be a great underachievement!

Would I really learn Project Management in the PMP workshop?

Does a PMP workshop teach you Project Management or is it just a key to pass the PMP exam?

Project Management is a vast subject! You can’t learn Project Management in 35 hours! However, there is a lot that can be achieved within 35 hours! In any case, we at Celtem ensure that every hour spent in the workshop is useful! After all these are very expensive 35 hours of professional time!

Also, the participants, by requirement have to have 4500 hours of real project management experience! So they are expected to have a fairly wide real life experience of the project management processes! The workshop helps in bridging some of the gaps and exposing them to areas they may have formerly not delved in- the most common example being that of Procurement Management.

We believe, a good PMP workshop need to strike a balance between:

• Covering all the Project Management processes
• Reserving enough time for healthy discussion on real life scenarios and allowing the participants to share their own experiences in project scenarios!
• Devote some time on the nature of exam, the type of questions to expect and how to best approach your preparation for the exam!

Over the years, we at Celtem have been successful at not only ensuring the complete coverage of the PMBOK, but also managing enough time to discuss the professional experiences of our participants!

Participant’s sharing of their experiences is the real icing on the cake and helps in enriching and completing the learning process! I believe that without these discussions our workshop would be very dry and boring! Thanks to the participants our workshops are far from being dry and boring!

Also, during the past year we have had a few participants who, before attending our workshop, had earlier taken the PMP preparatory workshop with another provider, but for various reasons could not take the exam! Their feedback has been very encouraging for us! They have consistently rated us better than some of the other workshops (though I am sure there are a lot of very good PMP trainers)!

Our participants have constantly validated our conviction and approach that Project Management is not a theoretical subject and that each participant has a lot of learning to bring to the group- by active participation and sharing of real life scenarios to better understand and appreciate the PMBOK processes. Thanks to them, we are all richer!

Happy learning!

Nitin Kapoor, PMP

On behalf of Celtem PMP team- Nabin, Surasri and Nitin