EVENT: PODCAST

SERIES: MANAGE THIS

EPISODE: 001

DATE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2016

HOST: NICK WALKER

GUESTS: ANDY CROWE & BILL YATES

CALLER: JOHN BATES

SOURCE: MANAGETHISEPISODEONEVERSIONONEMP3.MP3

LENGTH: 33 MINUTES

NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project

managers for project managers. Today is Tuesday, January 5th,

and every couple of weeks we’re going to get together to talk

about topics related to project management certification, but

also about things that matter to you as a professional

project manager.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who have

probably helped more people realize their goal of becoming

project managers than anyone else on Planet Earth. Andy Crowe

and Bill Yates are our resident experts on project management.

If you have questions, they have answers. Bill and Andy, let’s

let our listeners know you a little bit better. Why don’t you

introduce yourselves and tell us what you’d like for us to take

away from our times together. Andy?

ANDY CROWE: Yeah, thank you, Nick. This is an exciting time

for us to kick this off. My name is Andy Crowe. I’ve got a few

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project management certifications – a PMP, the PgMP, the PMI-ACP,

and the Certified Scrum Master, the CSM. But that’s one of the

things we do here. We train project managers at Velociteach.

And it’s exciting to get to work with project managers. This is

my tribe. These are the people that I work with.

So I started my career back as a software developer many, many

years ago. It’s getting to be more and more nowadays. Getting

a little long in the tooth here. But we’ve been able to

translate that and our love for project management into helping

people realize their goals. And some people that we work with

just love to get better at project management. Some of them are

pursuing certifications and very specific goals. This is what

we love to do, and we’re excited about it.

So I’m a process guy. This is my passion. I care about how

things are done. I like to see – the way things are done

sometimes matters as much as the outcome to me. And it’s a fun

thing to get to do that. I also get to work with Bill Yates.

Bill, introduce yourself.

BILL YATES: Yeah. I can certainly say that Andy is a process

guy. You said that accurately, sir. We’ve been working

together now here at Velociteach about 10 years. Prior to that

I was in the utility industry. I worked in the financial

analysis side for utilities. Pretty exciting stuff. Worked

with a lot of DBAs, CPAs, folks with masters in taxation. So we

did a lot of software to help these utilities compute their

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depreciation and do some of that stuff that projects have to do

with software. And so a lot of my background is project

management for software for utilities. I’ve got a passion for

training and instruction. I’ve really enjoyed the time

with Velociteach.

And again, Andy, you hit on it. One of the joys for me is

helping people achieve their goal, whether it’s a goal of a

certification, or whether it’s a goal of just improvement as a

project manager. So it’s very satisfying to me and really for

the whole team at Velociteach to help to that end. Now, I do

have some letters after my name, as well. So it’s Bill Yates,

sounds like Bill Gates, but Bill Gates does not have the

certifications that Bill Yates does. So I’ve got the PMP, the

PgMP, and the PMI-ACP for the Agile credential.

ANDY CROWE: And the Certified Scrum Master, too; don’t you?

BILL YATES: No, not me.

ANDY CROWE: You don’t have that, got it, got it.

BILL YATES: Yup.

ANDY CROWE: Okay. Well, we’re close to being twins on that.

BILL YATES: That’s right.

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ANDY CROWE: So makes for a long business card.

BILL YATES: True.

NICK WALKER: Well, let’s jump right in. One of the things that

we’ll always be talking about on these podcasts is the PMP exam.

Lot of people interested in this topic. And there are some

changes coming to this exam, changes that might introduce a lot

of fear, some uncertainty, some doubt. So Andy, should we be

worried about that?

ANDY CROWE: Well, and it’s a good question, Nick. No, I would

say we should not be worried. We should be focused on it. It

definitely commands our attention. So January the 11th, changes

are coming to the PMP exam. PMI is changing. What they are

going to do – so let’s talk about the good news and the bad news.

The bad news first: 25 percent of the changes are the questions

are changing. And that’s a significant number. So 200-question

exam, 25 percent of the changes – 175 of those questions are

actually graded, and we’ll talk about the other 25 in just a

moment. But 25 percent of those questions are changing, the

content’s changing. And so that’s got a lot of people’s

attention. That is around 50 questions that are going to be

different. So what do we do with that? What matters with that?

Now for maybe a little bit of the better news. The PMP exam is

really based on a couple of documents. First one is the PMBOK

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Guide. A lot of you have that sitting on your desk. A lot of

people are familiar with that. It’s a document published by the

Project Management Institute, and it goes through and explains

processes related to project management, how things are carried

out, breaks it down into discrete processes organized by

knowledge areas and process group. The good news is, even

though the exam’s changing, that’s not changing. So that’s one

piece right there. The other is the Role Delineation Study.

Bill, tell us a little bit about what the RDS is, and how it’s

used.

BILL YATES: Yeah, so the PMBOK Guide gets updated about every

four years from PMI, from the Project Management Institute. And

then on about a five- to seven-year cycle we have this Role

Delineation Study that can also impact the exam for the PMP. So

the role delineation study is PMI’s attempt to look at the role

of the project manager across the globe and determine if the

definition that they have in their mind is reflective of reality.

ANDY CROWE: So would you say that the PMBOK Guide is maybe a

little more theoretical, and the RDS is a little more practical?

BILL YATES: Absolutely, that nails it. Yeah, the RDS involves

a lot of surveying and interviewing actual practitioners. Then

PMI comes back and says, okay, I think we have some nuanced

changes that we need to make to the exam. And I’ll give a

couple of examples of that. But that rolls through into a

document that is called the PMI PMP Examination Content Outline.

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And for those who are in this business like we’re in, where we

create content to help people pass an exam, we’re familiar with

that document. So that document has been updated here to

reflect that change January 11, 2016.

ANDY CROWE: Right. And there’s a handful of tasks that PMI has

added or changed to that.

BILL YATES: Right. There are eight new tasks that have been

identified. So one of the things that we did here at

Velociteach is we did a side-by-side comparison of the

examination content outline prior to the change and then after

the change. So we receive those documents from PMI. Then we do

the walkthrough and look to see what did change. We identify

the eight new tasks that come through that, as well as some that

were changed, minor changes mostly. You would not be surprised

at all, the new chapter in the PMBOK Guide on stakeholder

management received a lot more emphasis in the content outline.

ANDY CROWE: Right. And that’s something we had noted earlier,

that stakeholder management was really light.

BILL YATES: Right. Right, it was light. We saw that, and

really the treatment that you had in the textbook early on,

we’re looking at the PMBOK Guide, it’s a lighter chapter. And

now we see, through the RDS and the changes that wrinkled into

the exam content outline, more emphasis, or a bit more maturity,

if you will.

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ANDY CROWE: Right. And Bill, just to pick up on that, one of

the things that I believe related to this – and this is a theory.

I can’t prove it at this point.