Certification Insider

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My goal of having these show notes on the website is to give a quick and concise introduction of the podcast topic and to tell you what you can expect to learn from it. Sometimes I am right on point and sometimes I’m a little more vague.

And tomorrow, when you are back at the office working on your project requirements your goal will be to correctly and succinctly describe the requirements for that project your company is going to launch. The big difference here is that your descriptions have to be 100% on point. You cannot afford to be vague, because requirements that can be misinterpreted is a sure-fire way to doom your project. So what can you do to improve your requirements?

The problem of poorly written, ambiguous, and inconsistent requirements is something that Jordan Kyriakidis (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordankyriakidis/) has thought about a lot. And his answer to this problem is not only a list of “21 Top Tips for Writing an Exceptionally Clear Requirements Document” (https://qracorp.com/write-clear-requirements-document/) but also to use computing power. Yes, there is actually a software that will scan your requirements document and tell you what's wrong with it.

But we’re not going to talk about the software much, because that would be pretty boring here on an audio podcast. Instead, Jordan and I look at the root causes of poorly written requirements and then we introduce you to the most important 6 out his 21 tips. In that way you can start using your brain power to write better requirements.

(This interview was originally published on The Project Management Podcast.)

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Are you by any chance thinking of getting your certification as a PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®? Great. Because that certification is our topic.

Today you are going to meet Jonathan Hebert (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-hebert-pmp-csm-pmi-acp-0712471) who not only passed his PMI-ACP® Exam, but he also got audited in the process. So he has a story to tell!

As you know, the rules of all Project Management Institute (PMI)® exams are such that we are not allowed to discuss specific questions from the exam. But we can discuss Jonathan's overall experience, how he got his PMI-ACP Exam Prep, his general thoughts on the process and his recommendations to you. So you can look forward to an experience and tip filled interview on how to prepare for and pass your PMI-ACP Exam.

Full disclosure: Jonathan Hebert and Cornelius Fichtner both work for OSP International LLC, makers of The Agile PrepCast and The PMI-ACP Exam Simulator.

(This interview was originally published on The Project Management Podcast.)

If you’ve arrived here it’s because you are probably looking for the best study techniques for the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)^® Exam. You’re in luck! We support thousands of students to successfully pass their Project Management Institute (PMI)^® exams, and we know exactly what techniques work.

In this article I’ll cover four common study techniques, tell you whether they are effective and explain how to get the most out of them so your study time is focused and useful.

Technique 1 – Reading, Highlighting and Underlining the Guide

Many of us will be used to this study technique: go through a text, read it (sometimes aloud) and highlight or underline the portions that we want to draw special attention to for later.

Is It Effective?

Not really. Research published by the Association for Psychological Science shows that although people use this technique, highlighting and underlining isn’t an effective way to learn. In fact, it might stop you learning effectively because it focuses your mind to specific facts and not the bigger picture concepts.

However, reading by itself is a good technique to get started so do take the time to read through the A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide).

How To Make This CAPM^® Study Technique More Effective

Don’t simply read. Try to read actively, asking yourself questions as you go through sections of the PMBOK^® Guide. How does this relate to your work? Why is it relevant to the job of a project manager? What notes can you take that will help you remember this concept?

Read alternative books as well. There are lots of study guides that will help you for your CAPM Exam prep and make the concepts ‘real’.

Technique 2 – Listen to The PM PrepCast™ (for CAPM)

The PM PrepCast™ (for CAPM) is a Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)^® Exam prep video workshop. You can watch the lessons wherever you are, whenever is convenient using your tablet or smart phone.

Once you’ve been through the 140 lessons you’ll have covered all the material required to get you through the exam.

Is It Effective?

Yes! The research also shows that spreading out your study sessions is far more effective than cramming. The PM Prepcast (for CAPM) is a great way to plan your exam prep over time, spacing out your learning sessions. When your study tools are already broken down into digestible, flexible chunks it’s far easier to master the concepts and build on what you have already learned.

The PM Prepcast (for CAPM) also includes real-world examples, which students say are crucial to being able to understand the concepts. The more you can grasp how the ideas are used in the workplace, the easier it is to recall that information in the exam.

Technique 3 – Taking Notes on the Guide

Writing your own notes is another common study technique that you probably learned at school. You can create your own flashcards

Taking notes is the act of write down important information while reading the material to be learned. This is another technique many of us learned while in school.

Is It Effective?

Yes, if you do it effectively. Simply copying out the PMBOK^® Guide isn’t going to add any value to your understanding of the key concepts.

Taking notes can be time-consuming so use your time wisely. Concentrate on areas where you know you need to review the principles and take notes in your own words, or make a mind-map, instead of copying.

How To Make This CAPM^® Study Technique More Effective

Here are two ways to make taking notes more effective as a study technique for CAPM^®.

#1: Create Your Own Flashcards

Take your notes in a way that allows you to hide key terms and definitions by either folding the page over or covering it with another sheet. Then you can test yourself and your ability to recall important concepts and what they mean.

It’s easy to do this if you structure your notes in two columns. In one column, write the name of the term or concept. In the other, write the definition or the key piece of information you want to remember.

This technique works best when you use loose leaf paper which you can organize into a binder. Notebooks are good for keeping all your notes together, and they are highly portable if you study on the go, but they don’t lend themselves as well for making flashcards like this.

#2: Use a Brain Dump

A brain dump is where you write down everything you know about a topic. Once you’ve read a section of the PMBOK^® Guide, start a fresh piece of paper or a new page in your notebook and write down everything you can remember about that concept. You can do this as a list, a mind-map or whatever format helps you remember most clearly.

Then check back to make sure that you included everything important. The more often you do this kind of note taking, the easier you will find it to recall information during the exam.

This technique makes note taking far more effective because you are filtering information and recalling it in a way that works with your own learning preferences.

Technique 4 – Taking a CAPM Practice Exam

There are a lot of ways to use practice test questions in your preparation for the CAPM^® Exam. You can work through questions that relate to the topic you have just studied, or as a way to identify where you might want to focus again when you come back to review a topic. Or you could take a full length three hour, one hundred and fifty question CAPM practice exam.

Practicing exam taking techniques is just as important as ensuring you have a full grasp on the concepts and ideas behind project management. It’s probably been some time since you sat in an exam room and worked solidly on something in stressful conditions for three hours. As well as giving you confidence that you know your material, practice exams also give you confidence that you can pace yourself, get through the questions and are well prepared for what the actual exam situation is going to be like.

If you are looking for a CAPM Exam practice test that is close to the CAPM Exam, look into using the CAPM Exam Simulator.

Is It Effective?

Yes! Testing yourself as you go through the material, through using flashcards or the questions at the end of a chapter in a prep book are a good way to improve your skills. You’re learning how the questions are phrased and what sort of answers you are likely to see.

However, the best way to make this a really effective study technique is to take a full-length practice CAPM Exam under timed conditions, so you get used to the pressure of the clock counting down!

Conclusion: CAPM Study Techniques

You’re a busy person so you want to spend time on study techniques that are proven to be effective. While some of your choices are going to be down to your personal best ways of working (like whether you take notes as a mind-map or a list) there are definitely some study techniques that outperform others.

Focus on taking effective notes, using CAPM study tools to support your learning and spreading your study sessions out over time. Use the PMBOK^® Guide and practice answering test questions to prepare yourself for the real thing. Finally, take advantage of the knowledge others have gained from their study experience by visiting online forums.

Learning the lessons of past projects is important if you want to improve as a project manager. Understanding what worked and what didn’t is essential for your professional development when managing projects and for getting better outcomes each time.

This article contains everything you need to know about lessons learned management techniques to help achieve exactly that. Lessons learned management techniques for project management professionals are the knowledge and skills that a project manager needs to be able to use lessons learned to improve their projects.

They are different from the lessons learned about passing your Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam. Those lessons are about exam practice and how other people prepared for and passed the PMP Exam. If you are in fact looking for lessons learned on how to pass the PMP Exam then you’ll find lots of tips and advice at https://www.project-management-prepcast.com/ll.

Back to lessons learned management techniques: they form part of your PMP Exam so this article will both help you prepare for questions on the topic and give you the tools you need to learn from your experiences on projects.

PMP Lessons Learned Management Techniques: 3 Things To Know For Your Exam

‘Management techniques’ are just effective ways of working. They are how we capture, record, analyze and use lessons learned for continuous improvement in our projects. Now we’ve got that cleared up, here are three essential things to know about them for your PMP® Exam.

First, the PMP Exam Content Outline specifically mentions lessons learned management techniques as an area of cross-cutting knowledge and skill. You should expect to get asked about them.

Second, lessons learned processes are useful across the whole project management life cycle from Initiating to Closing. However, lessons learned management techniques relate specifically to how you manage the process of gathering and sharing lessons learned on your project. This is more relevant to the Monitoring & Controlling and Closing stages of your project.

Third, while you probably haven’t given much thought to how you manage lessons learned, the good news is that you most likely have all the skills you need. You simply need to know how to explain them and respond to questions about them in the PMP Exam.

The Lessons Learned Project Management Process

We project managers are always fond of processes and procedures! The generally accepted process for projects is that you collect the lessons, prioritize and validate them, and then store them somewhere while making them available to other teams. The process doesn’t end there. The final step in the lessons learned process is that you reuse what you have learned. They feed into continuous improvement.

There is a fundamental difference between how lessons learned are often managed on projects that use a waterfall-based methodology compared to those projects that have chosen an Agile approach.

At a high level, Agile teams tend to be a lot more focused on continuous improvement and will review performance more regularly. Agile team retrospectives can focus on the team’s working practices – how they work together, celebrating a job well done, bettering the relationships in the team, and often a more traditional approach focuses on the project tasks and deliverables and not how the team’ performed together. This is an area that a waterfall lessons learned review could and should cover but is often forgotten.

Agile teams will also have release or sprint retrospectives where the focus is on the product or service covered in that release. On Agile projects you’ll also have project retrospectives where you look at the whole project.

Waterfall project management approaches typically review project lessons learned towards the end of the project.

How to Run a Lessons Learned Project Management Meeting

Should your meeting be formal or informal? Both can work but you certainly need a formal outcome. The more formal structures work best when you think the discussion is going to be difficult because something went wrong or you worry that there might be blame apportioned to someone in the team.

Sometimes you’ll only get the right people to attend if they feel it will be a formal event. If formality helps you get the right level of attention and commitment to the meeting, then go for that!

It’s a good idea to use a facilitator if you can. They can help keep you, and everyone else, on track. Lessons learned sessions don’t deliver any value when the discussion only focuses on what went wrong. A facilitator can help the group turn that into positives by eliciting what could be done differently next time and creating concrete actions to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Use an agenda, stick to time and follow all the other good meeting management techniques that you can.

Lessons Learned Project Management Questions

The best lessons learned project meetings are those that have been well-prepared. Create a list of questions in advance and send them to the attendees. This gives them the chance to prepare. It’s hard to remember everything when you are put on the spot, even if your lessons learned meeting only covers the past phase or few months. Give people the chance to go through their records and remember what happened by letting them know the topics that are going to come up.

Here are some lessons learned project meeting questions to get you started:

• What worked well?
• What didn’t work well?
• What was challenging? 
• What lessons can we learn about that for future projects?
• What actions are we going to do to make sure that future projects see and understand these lessons? (Examples: Building templates, updating the team wiki, changing processes, writing a new user guide, and so on.)
• Were there any unintended consequences?
• What skills did you need that were missing and how did you manage?
• Were the right people involved at the right time?
• What should we do differently next time? How are we going to do it differently?

If you need more questions the best starting point is to go back to your business case and objectives or project goals. Build your questions from there.

Lessons Learned: Project Management Challenges

Even though we have great lessons learned project management process and the resulting outcomes of our lessons learned meeting, we are faced with the fact that companies still don’t actually learn from them.

We need to convert lessons learned, which are usually backwards looking, into a tool that is forward looking and helps us to avoid past mistakes in the future. Convert the lessons from your project review meeting into actions.

For example, if one lesson pointed out that you didn’t spend enough time in project planning, update your project management plan templates to add in more time so that on the next project you’re prompted to allow adequate time for the work.

Making the same mistakes over and over again costs money and impacts on productivity, so learn from other project managers and their project as well. Ask your project team what they learned about doing similar things in the past and what you should be looking out for. Review whatever databases or documents exist before you start, including your own file of notes if you have one.

Next Steps For Learning About Lessons Learned

There’s of course a lot more to learn about lessons learned than we have space to discuss in this article. Make sure that your PMP training course covers what you need to know. The PM PrepCast contains everything you need to know about lessons learned management techniques, and everything else required to get you through the PMP Exam. Find out more at http://www.pm-prepcast.com/pmprepcast

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Conflict in project management is inevitable. In fact they say that the only way to not have a project management conflict is to have a one-person project. And even then, some people have a tendency to argue with themselves.

Karin Brünnemann (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karinbrunnemann) recently gave a presentation on the topic of Managing Conflict in Projects to the Project Management Institute (PMI)® Slovakia Chapter. And because it was such a success she suggested that we bring it to you as well!

Karin’s presentation and our interview is full of solid advice and best practices you can apply to the conflicts you will inevitably encounter. We will discuss: Definition & Characteristics of Conflict

• Conflict in the Context of Project Management
• How to Analyse a Conflict
• How to Manage Conflict

A big part of the interview is actually focused on that last part -- the actual project management conflict resolution. We are, however, not going to talk about conflict resolution on multicultural projects. That’s reserved for next week.

(This interview was originally published on The Project Management Podcast.)