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How to find The Best Answer on PMP Exam Questions
December 10, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: PMP
How to find The Best Answer on PMP Exam Questions
By Cornelius Fichtner, PMP
Quite often, project management is not totally black and white. A project manager can respond in various ways to events. This means that you are not only faced with the issue that you have a personality conflict on your team but you must also decide, whether to address this conflict directly with the team members or if it would be better to come up with a team building exercise that may help your team to overcome the situation.
Sample PMP® Exams mirror this situation. Quite often you will see a question and at least 2 answers seem right… and now, for 1 point towards your PMP® certification, you must select the best one. Let me repeat that: you must select the BEST one. None of the answers may be 100% correct, but one of them will be BETTER than the others when analyzed right.
There is of course no single, correct approach to analyzing the questions, but there are several concepts and techniques that you should know.
Concept: The PMBOK® Guide is always right — The PMI strives to improve project management environments in such a way that in the future all projects will always be executed in the most ideal circumstances. This is the way the PMBOK® Guide has been written and it is also the light under which to answer the questions. Answer them from the perspective of the PMBOK® Guide, not from your own experiences. When in doubt, then the PMBOK® Guide wins.
Concept: A Project Manager is proactive — As a project manager you may never leave a small problem linger and give it the opportunity and time to become a large issue. When a problem is presented to you, you will first analyze it, define the various options that are available to you and then select the response that correctly addresses the root cause. For our example above, the better answer would therefore be, to address the personality conflict with the two team members directly, and not try and solve it in a circumspect way, by holding a team building meeting.
Technique: Read the question first — This is the traditional way. Start out by reading the question. Make sure that you understand it, and that you can distinguish between the important facts and the extraneous information: learn to ignore those facts that do not relate to the question. Then Read all four possible answer and usually two of the four will be very obviously incorrect and can be eliminated. Then weigh the two remaining questions against each other and make your choice.
Technique: Use your brain — Start out by reading the question but not the answers. Now close your eyes and think… what should the answer be? When you are ready, open your eyes again, read the answers. More often than not “your” answer will be there.
Technique: Start bottom up — Read the answers first, then read the question. This upside down approach can be helpful in the case of very long questions.
Technique: Last sentence first — Another technique for approaching long questions is to read the last sentence first. The last sentence usually contains the actual question. Now that you know what what they really want to know, read the text in this light.
Also remember, that you will have a checkbox that allows you to mark a question if you are uncertain. That way, you can come back to the marked questions for review.
Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is the host of The Project Management Podcast™ at www.thepmpodcast.com and The Project Management PrepCast™, the first true PMP® Podcast at www.pmprepcast.com. Cornelius worked as a Project Manager in his native Switzerland, in Germany and in the USA for the last 17 years. He received his PMP credential in April 2004. He has led projects for a management consulting company, a national retailer and an internet startup company. Currently, Cornelius works as a project manager for one of the oldest financial service providers in the USA. His passions are project management methodologies, PMOs and helping others pass the PMP Exam. In addition to hosting the PrepCast™, he is an instructor for the PMP Workshop and the 2007 Chair of his local PMI chapter. He currently lives in Silverado, California, USA with his wife and their two computers.
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