Entire Series Posted!

The entire Drawn Out Project Management series is posted to YouTube!

After many months, The Crowd Training has finished drawing out and explaining the 49 processes of the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK 6th edition! You can now access the entire playlist or view the processes you need the most support on.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZdjZVoQFYUOOFnLr2R3E4A

The Crowd Training’s Drawn Out Project Management YouTube series takes all the processes from the 6th edition PMBOK and presents them in a simple, visual way. Similar to a whiteboard, the processes are explained and illustrated much like I have done for hundreds of PMP and CAPM candidates in in-person instructor led courses over the last 14 years. The drawings I did for those students were very effective in aiding their grasping of the various project management processes and concepts, as well as putting the nomenclature and PMI organization of the processes and knowledge area. As you know, we as project managers – or inspiring project managers – do not walk around spewing PMI terms like, “Hey Joe, today I am performing the Identify Risks process as part of the Risk Management area. How about you today?” No, we don’t. At least, I hope you don’t. That would be a bit weird and pretentious.

Nevertheless, for the exam at least, we must memorize and internalize the structure, naming, and flow arranged and codified by the Project Management Institute over that last 40+ years. That is the objective of these whiteboard animations: to give you an easy, free way to memorize and internalize the vast amount of knowledge and terms you are expected to know and apply from the PMBOK 6th edition and project management in general. I hope it helps you in your studies as much as it helped me and my many PMP and CAPM students. Enjoy!

Here is a list of all the 49 PM processes and links to their videos.

Initiation

Develop Project Charter

Identify Stakeholders

Planning

Plan scope management

Plan schedule management

Plan cost management

Plan quality management

Plan resource management

Plan communications management

Plan risk management

Plan procurement management

Plan stakeholder management

Develop project management plan

Collect requirements

Define scope

Create work breakdown schedule

Define activities

Sequence activities

Estimate activity durations

Develop schedule

Estimate costs

Develop budget

Estimate activity resources

Identify risks

Perform qualitative risk analysis

Perform quantitative risk analysis

Plan risk responses

Executing

Manage project knowledge

Manage quality

Manage team

Manage communications

Manage stakeholder engagement

Direct and manage project work

Acquire resources

Develop team

Implement risk responses

Conduct procurements

Monitoring and Controlling

Monitor and control project work

Monitor communication

Monitor risk

Monitor stakeholder engagement

Control scope

Control schedule

Control cost

Control quality

Control resources

Control procurements

Validate scope

Perform integrated change control

Closing

Close Project or Phase

Manage Project Team Whiteboard

Another whiteboard animation explaining the processes of the 6th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK has been posted to YouTube. This time on the Manage Team process.

As part of the Drawn Out Project Management series, I am attempting to draw out the inputs, outputs, tools and techniques of the 47 processes of the PMBOK to help explain them and make sense of the overall process. I used this technique when I was preparing for my PMP exam about 14 years ago when it was the 3rd edition of the PMBOK. Today, the PMBOK and the PMP exam is on its 6th edition; nevertheless the drawing of the components of the processes stills works just as well today as it then. In some respects, it works better today because the process inputs, outputs, and tools/techniques are more condensed and universal. There are fewer details to remember and less precision needed in the drawings since the drawings can represent more broad, high level concepts. 

The Manage Team process whiteboard illustrates the ITTOs of the process as it exists in the 6th edition. There is not much different in this process compared to when I created a similar video for the 5th edition. Really the only major item of note is that it resides in the Project Resource Management knowledge area and not the Project Human Resource Management knowledge area – mind blown, I know!

Hope this helps you understand this and the other processes more. I shall keep updating The Crowd Training YouTube channel with new videos. When they will post depends on my time and motivation. I am about 3/4ths of the way through the processes. After I complete the processes, I may move onto explaining other project management concepts and best practices on a whiteboard or with my animated character PM Guy I use for my PM City online courses. But not making any promises yet. I do want to do more with the agile project management and the book and courseware I have recently finished.

https://youtu.be/x261NvcsP_Q 

Opening Day!

PM City is now open! After more than 8 months of designing and constructing the best project management online learning experience from the ground up, PM City is now open for business!

PM City is the amazing new interactive online course development exclusively for the 6th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and the Project Management Professional PMP certification exam. PM City is a production of The Crowd Training http://www.thecrowdtraining.com/pm6 and is available at crowd.myabsorb.com for only $720 for a lifetime subscription. [Or use the coupon code thisistheyear to get the entire course for $201.80 USD]

PM City is fully online and self paced. The e-learning course fulfills the 35 hour project management requirement for the PMP application from PMI. The Project Management Institute accepts the certificate of completion from The Crowd Training’s PM City course.

PM City can be used as your complete course or as a supplement to your other in person training or self study.

Everyone learns differently. As such, not all project management courses should be presented and delivered in all the same ways. This course was envisioned to purposely shake up the project management training industry. The tired method of having PM instructors read over their dull and plain PowerPoint slides is ineffective. Recording someone stand there or sit in front of their webcam talking at you for hours is not much better. Sitting there passively while someone lectures to you for hours is not a pedagogically sound approach to teaching. And in our modern society with the advancements of technology there is no reason to force an approach that is only meaningful to a few onto the masses. That is why The Crowd Training wanted to create something effective for the masses.

As you become more engaged and active in your learning, the more it sticks. That stickiness is extremely important as you are taking a high stakes, high cost exam. There is too much on the line to spend time on training that does not match your learning style. No one wants to retake the exam at any cost. You want to pass the first time and obtain that highly valued Project Management Professional distinction. That is what I set out to make for you.

Beginning with my own study and preparation for the PMP Exam over 13 years ago, I observed how almost every training course or book out there was boring and fairly dry. It consisted primarily of someone lecturing to you for hours. In my case in particular, there were no PowerPoints or whiteboards or flipcharts of any kind. It was hours, upon hours, of someone dumping all that he knew about the PMP exam at us. After 9 – 10 hours a day of dumping information on us, there was not much sticking. Actually, I don’t think much was sticking post-lunch.

To overcome the assaulting barrage of project management talk I drew pictures, made sketches, created mind maps, took notes, and otherwise made sense of the drone of words. As a visual learner, I need to see it. A picture is worth a thousand words. And I had to make a few hundred pictures a day to keep up. Those pictures became the cornerstone of my project management training delivery for years. I still have past students to this day saying how my graphics and drawings have stuck with them years after they passed the PMP exam.

When it came time to finally have the technology to not only present my drawings to PMP learners, but to provide an online manner for learners to engage and control their learning, I was so excited to be able to offer such a product. I dedicated hours and sleep to sketch out my vision of how project management training could be. I wanted it to be accessible and on demand. I wanted online learning not to be a chore or something “they have to get through”. I wanted it to be meaningful and sticky.

After months of laying out all the neighborhoods [a.k.a. knowledge areas and concept blocks of project management] and constructing all their elements, I am proud to announce that PM City is open! It took so much effort to envision new ways of presenting the content, illustrating material, recording audio that was conversational and approachable, animating my drawings and my voice, and bringing the project management content to life. But even more than that, it required the technical capabilities to make the true control and interactivity possible. Every box clicked had to trigger some action or reaction. Voiceovers had to play only when the user wished them to play. Navigation was not to be linear, which requires more code to connect the dots and allow the learner to return to content they wish to repeat as often as they wished without needing to hunt and peek through hours of video footage.

PM City is truly an awesome new way to study and prepare for the Project Management Professional certification exam. And the best practices of learning does not stop there! To meld the best online PMP training with the tried and true success of the in person instructor led classroom, The Crowd Training is offering a series of “Power Prep PMP Weekend” classes. These weekend PMP training sessions augment the online learning content. By combining the advantages of both the online training and the off line face-to-face training, you get the best of both worlds. Best of all, you don’t have to take away any time from work. The online learning is done on demand and on your time and choosing. The in person classroom is only one weekend! A condensed, powerful weekend to meet with instructors and fellow PMP candidates to ask questions, take practice mock exams, and extend your learning.

These Power Prep courses are scheduled in select cities throughout the United States in 2018 starting with San Diego the weekend of March 17 – 18, 2018. Here the link to hold your spot AND get full access to the awesome online PMP prep content: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/6th-edition-pmbok-pmp-exam-power-prep-weekend-course-san-diego-tickets-38457688983

It is a winning combination! What are you waiting for? Don’t live in the Southern California area? There are other options in 2018, as well as getting your key to PM City. Become a PMP Citizen and get learning!

Take the 5th Edition Exam or Wait for the 6th?

I get the question regularly, “Should I rush and sit for the 5th edition of the PMP exam or should I wait for the 6th edition? Everyone is telling me to take the PMP exam now because it is changing.”

As this is a common inquiry, I decided to type up one of my responses here in this blog to hopefully help others with the same question.

In short, whether you obtain your PMP via the 5^th edition or 6^th you should be ok. The reason that a changeover gathers so much attention is that when the PMBOK changed from 2nd to 3rd and 3rd to 4th they were relatively drastic. The exams also got more difficult – more situational, less memorization. And in terms of the 4th edition, the structure of the naming conventions got more logical and consistent, but drastically different for those who learned it in previous editions. Now the exam changes are more subtle. I would even argue that the changes are for the betterment of everyone and not overbearing. So now the rush to take an exam is more for those people who have been studying and want to test on the edition they have been working off of, as well as training companies wanting to capitalize on reason to push classes.

I have been thru many changeovers. I got my PMP on the 3^rd edition. I started instructing with the 3^rd edition. Was a contributor to the 4^th and 5^th editions of the PMBOK [so if you get a 5^th edition, you will see my name on p501, but if you get a 6^th you will not].  Have created courses for 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th editions. Now I am building a 6^th edition online course in the way that I would have liked – interactive, visual, and engaging. Point being, whether you cram and take a weekday or weekend in person class (which is the way I got my PMP 13 years ago) or online or a combination of them in either 5^th or 6^th, you will be fine. My recommendation to people is to choose study options that fit your learning style and your timing. Are you better at reading… sitting in a class with an instructor… talking with others… going at your own pace or the pace of others… visual learner or prefer lectures… like to do a little each day or fully immersed days…etc.

Do you have a time crunch or just want to get it out of the way? The quickest way is to buckle down and do nothing but prepare and sit for the exam. If not able to afford the high costs, the time off work, and the hours of dedication in short order, then get online courses like mine and other resources and carve out a plan that is realistic AND hold yourself to it! Schedule your exam early and hold yourself to it. Having a deadline set and telling yourself you cannot move it makes you more focused and motivated. It is too easy to pushback something that is not rooted or set. Much harder to deprioritize the exam when you are committed to a date and time.

There are a lot of options out there. Many people use many options. Really it comes down to you. Are you disciplined to study on your own? Are you disciplined to focus for 2-5 days in a class and sit for exam soon after while everything is still jiggling around in your brain?

Let me know what you decide. I am curious about your story. You can enter your stories and thoughts in the comment section.

If you would like to take advantage of my training offering, snagging it now is definitely financially advantageous [only $99 if pre-order; $720 if post-launch in January]. If your plan is to time it for the 6^th edition, then using The Crowd Training course on its own or in combination with any other type of course puts you in good hands. If you plan to go for the 5^th edition, I do have some games that you could play to help you prepare!

Best of luck!

The 6th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PBMoK 6)

The Project Management Institute (PMI) updates their Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) every few years – give or take. This is a wonderful thing. It would be arrogant to think that every best practice of project management was captured precisely in the first try and thinking that practices and the profession does not change over time. Taking a look at the latest draft of the upcoming edition of the PMBOK, I am thinking that they are on the right track.

Personally, I have experienced the changeover from 3rd to 4th and 4th to the 5th. I was a full time project management instructor, developer, and author during those transitions. I was also one of the contributors to the 4th edition. Not that influences my impressions, but I do declare that move from the 3rd edition to the 4th edition was the most radical and beneficial. This was primarily due to the standardization of naming and structure. The process nomenclature was all over the board in third edition. The fourth edition set out to uniformly establish all processes with a VERB – NOUN structure. For instance Scope Planning became Plan Scope Management. Does not sound to drastic or earth-shattering, but as instructor attempting to get all my students to understand, memorize, and internalize all the vast amounts of content and exact naming, this was a major improvement.

Reading thru the sixth edition, there is not the major structural changes like those just mentioned. Nevertheless, there is obvious recognition of how our industry is maturing and expanding. There appears to be more attention given to all the various industries where our project management skills and methodologies are used and applied. This is most noticeable in terms of agile project management practices. As one certified in PMI’s Agile certification called the PMI-ACP, I welcome the inclusion of agile considerations in with the more traditional methods of project management. Naturally this demands more of project managers and those seeking the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, but it is not out of line to ask for our PMPs to be more well rounded and obtain a broader knowledge base and tool bank in which to lead projects with. I equate everything contained in any edition of the PMBOK and the broader collective of what we expect a certified PMP to know is like a toolbox. A carpenter has his or her own toolbox that enables them to tackle various projects. Every project he or she works on is not going to require the same exact tools or strategies to meet the project’s objectives. Same with project managers. We need to have a toolbox. The more it contains, the more we have available to us. The more we comprehend the tools contained within, the more we are able to make the most appropriate decisions. Project management, like carpentry, requires skills, knowledge, and practice. And like any trade, we should expect the industry, the knowledge bank, and the technologies used to grow and evolve in hand.

So I fully embrace the upcoming changes to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. I am excited to train future and current project managers and PMP seekers on the 6th edition of the PMBOK. The PMBOK 6th edition is expected to be released later this year (2017) in the 3rd or 4th quarter.

My Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep App

My Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam Prep App

Screenshot from my windows 8 PMP app

For Windows 8 computers, laptops, and tablets, I created – with the help of my C# programmer friend – an app with questions I have written.  These questions have been used in my PMP Exam Prep courses over the years.  They have been tweaked and updated per the feedback from my students and others.  Beyond trying to provide prospective PMP exam takers with good, relevant questions, I also wanted to provide them with the experience of taking the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam as it is administered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

So those using my app will experience the PMP test taking experience as much as I could emulate.  The exam questions have the 4 answer choices.  There is ability to go back or forward; and even the option to jump to any question you like.  You can ‘Mark’ or ‘Skip’ questions.  There is a grid displaying which questions have been answered or marked (from there you can go directly to any question you feel).  Like the real PMP exam, you can change your answer as many times as you like until you submit.  Once you submit, your score is provided.  Then, unlike the real exam, I have written some rationale for every single question so that you can get some feedback and reason for why the answers are considered correct or incorrect.  The app displays the answer you selected, as well as the correct answer, if different.

Thank you for checking out my app.  I have an Agile Project Management Exam prep app (PMI-ACP) in the Windows Store as well.  I am working on an ITIL Foundation version.  If you have questions for other certification exams, we can plug those in as well.

Getting APMG Accreditation for ITIL V3 Foundations Course

After many months of development, testing, designing, editing, and more editing, my ITIL v3 Foundations course is nearing accreditation!  For those seeking out an ITIL course, I am seeing the value of attending one that holds the official stamp-of-approval.

With ITIL certification exam courses, there are actually a few accreditation organizations out there.  Project Management Professional (PMP) is controlled exclusively by the Project Management Institute (PMI).  They own the certification.  They control the accreditation – which the lucky HUNDREDS have paid to get (called Registered Education Provider (REP)).  They control the exam and publications.

ITIL is a little different.  For better or worse – that is your decision.

ITIL as a brand name is owned and monitored by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the UK.  The exams and certification paperwork is created and handled by various organizations worldwide.  There is EXIN, CSME, and APMG to name a few.  (Full List Here)

On the good side, it provides competition; unlike PMI’s monopoly.  (Even though PMI is listed as “non-profit” they are surely making a killing.  $555 exam fee is only the start of people pay to be associated with them)

On the bad side, it provides some ambiguity and non-consistent standards.

In my quest to get accreditation and proper recognition, I have investigated the various accreditation organizations.  And I must say that APMG-US is the better choice.  Unfortunately for me, they are most expensive.  Alas, you get what you pay for.

APMG-US has been wonderful to work with.  They have guided us thru the process.  Been very responsive to our inquires and needs.  And most importantly, are making certain that the material is the best representation.  Having evaluated some of the ITIL Foundation programs out there, I had the impression that it only took some of them to copy the books onto presentation slides and call it good.  Glad APMG is being a little more thorough.  I have gone to great lengths to make certain my materials were not boring slides “telling” the learner what they are to know.  But to make it more dynamic, yet concrete; simple, yet complete.

The material should be thru complete review and approval within a month.  At that point I will be able to offer my coursework officially to all that wish to take on the IT Service Management certification schema known as ITIL v3!