Having previously worked ten years in a large global organization with a lot of exposure to the waterfall project approach and use of OPA'a and EEF's made the study material feel very familiar. Laterally during my time there, the organisation also began to adopt Agile working practices. Lesson here is nothing can replace good experience, and this will make the exam prep so much easier.
The 35 DPU’s required from a recognised PMP prep-courses are useful for high level overview but are not sufficient to sharpen the knowledge to the level required for of passing the exam. I found the course form TIA (Andrew Ramdayal) on Udemy was very good value for money and sufficiently gave good enough overview of the course content. Additionally, to this there are also a lot of very useful videos from David McLachlan, I found these were very good and free on YouTube. Lastly PMBOK process cheat sheets from Ricardo Vargas – again on YouTube – were very handy as a quick reference guide when reviewing answer on the simulator for checking process ITTO’s.
I elected to use the PM-Prepcast service for test simulator and found it to be a good match to the actual exam level with the caveat I felt the exam questioning was a little more open and less obvious, making the exam slightly harder imho.
A good simulator program is essential whereby the correct and incorrect answers are explained and referenced to the PMBOK guides both 6th and 7th editions as well as the Agile practice guide. I also found it very beneficial that in the PM-Prepcast there is the ability to drill down by domain and process area from test results to establish my weak spots to know what areas needed work.
For me this was a long process and in truth I perhaps could have passed sooner with less effort and not so good a score. However, the extra effort and stress I feel was worth it to have a more solid grounding in the material going forward after the exam.
Lastly during the exam, due to the wording of the questions being more open and imho, leaving the answer way more open to interpretation made me cognisant that I could be doing very well or very badly. Lesson here is to stay focused on the question in hand, keep going and get to the end!
Good Luck!
