Project Management Professional (PMP) credential

[Iron_chet]

A good PM is an invaluable resource, bad ones actually make things worse.

 

[Versatile]

I thought this thread was about spending cheese up on B.L.A.D.E.'s in the N.Y.C.

 

[LongTimeListener]

A test and a credential doesn't make you a PMP. You have to earn that title in the streets.

Get some bling and look mean and you can fake it just fine.

Does Whitlock have his PMP certification, or does he work his corners in more of an ad hoc manner?

 

[McNuggetsMan]

I've taught project management (mostly the heavily technical parts, like PERT and EVA) at the MBA/undergrad level. The certification can't be that hard, because that material is simply not that difficult. It is a pretty broad body of material (Lord only knows how many times I've stumbled across this or that document that purports to tap some portion of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge)).

I suspect that PMP certification is probably not going to provide as much of a leg up on the competition as it simply signals that you're at some minimal level of competence. Nothing wrong with that, but it's probably not going to be a career turnaround that some might suggest.

I suppose I should know this since I work for a big corporation and run projects, but what does a project management professional do?

Get everything bogged down in process rather than actually doing things.

Here is what a PM does.

Create a flow chart to dentify gaps in process.
Create a task list based on the flow chart.
Create weekly meetings to update the task list.
Create self serving e-mails to celebrate the project that was never a project being comple when people could have just done the work without needin gto update the douche with the task list.

Exactly this -- and spend a lot of time putting crap into Microsoft Project and classifying things as red/yellow/green in the most arbitrary way possible.

 

[Buck]

I don't like Microsoft Project.
But I'm not dismissive of project management.

It's not an issue of "do the work and get things done." Organizations don't really function that way.

It's not necessary for someone to be PMP certified to be a good project manager, but when you're hiring you're more likely to get someone good if set minimum standards.

It's not necessary to have a college degree to be a good journalist, but when I was going through journalism resumes, I'm looking for college grads.

If I was looking for a project manager and found someone with experience and/or a degree in project management, I'd wonder why the person hadn't taken the logical step of getting the certification.

 

[Amy]

I don't Microsoft Project.
But I'm not dismissive of project management.

It's not an issue of "do the work and get things done." Organizations don't really function that way.

It's not necessary for someone to be PMP certified to be a good project manager, but when you're hiring you're more likely to get someone good if set minimum standards.

It's not necessary to have a college degree to be a good journalist, but when I was going through journalism resumes, I'm looking for college grads.

If I was looking for a project manager and found someone with experience and/or a degree in project management, I'd wonder why the person hadn't taken the logical step of getting the certification.

So are Project Managers today what Black Belts used to be when Six Sigma was The Thing?

 

[Buck]

Kind of.
PMP is a specific certification with the field of project management.

There are similar in that Six Sigma delas with processes and effectiveness. The difference is the PMBOK/PMP best practices do not attempt to handle processes and effectiveness organization-wide.

The majority of projects fail. They don't come in on time and/or they don't come in on budget.
Some times they turn into Boston's Big Dig, but usually they are less epic than that.

 

[Batman]

In plotting my escape from Journalism Penitentiary, one of the jobs I applied for was as a project manager. Seemed like a lot of the skills of journalism translated well to it.
The little research I did on the PMP certificate didn't seem like it would be that hard to obtain. I saw one thing that said it was like a 30-hour online course (not sure if that's 30 hours of lessons or 30 credit hours) followed by an exam. If it's the former, it seems like something you could knock out pretty quickly.

You must have done very little research. Because from everything I've heard, especially from people who have their PMP certificate, it's incredibly difficult.

I know a guy who went through the 4-day boot camp, waited only one week and passed the exam. He said it was brutal.
I know a woman who studied for 9 months, did boot camps, joined study groups and passed the exam.
I know another guy who went through several boot camps, read multiple 500-page books two or three times, downloaded PMP training to his phone to listen while he was running....he studied for 5-6 months. And failed.

It's not a walk in the park. But as LTL said, it definitely does carry a lot of weight. That's a fact.

I should clarify, by "difficult to obtain," I meant in terms of having to go to school for a semester or two, or four. No doubt you need to do your homework and there's a lot of stuff to learn. It does, however, seem like if you have a handle on the basics and a decent brain in your head, that you can throw yourself into the material and preparation and obtain it in a few weeks if needed.

 

[Bradley Guire]

I've taken project management classes as part of my master's program, but my master's is not in project management.

My guess is that the PMP certification would be challenging.

PMPing ain't easy.

 

[beanpole]

In my new company, it will be essential to have if I ever want a promotion.