Track and Report Your PM Hours for the PMP Exam Application

I spent some time yesterday with a colleague of mine who is getting really serious about his PMP now. He and I embarked on this path together and took a prep course in March of last year. But like many, work and family life forced a reprioritization so that he didn’t complete the PMP last year. But now he’s ready. Could have something to do with the new surprise baby coming — #5.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you some of the things we talked about yesterday, in case you’re considering the PMP exam in the near future. I’ve already written a lot about study resources and recommendations; that’s found all over my site, so I’m not going to re-write that. Here are some other ideas to consider.

Reference

• PMP Credential Overview site.

There, you’ll find an explanation of the credential and a free downloadable guide to certifying, the PMP Handbook. Download it. Really.

There is quite a bit of work to do to get ready for the exam — and not just the studying. The PMP Handbook will explain that process. In short:

• You must meet minimum educational and experience requirements before you can take the exam.
• You will have to take some formal PM training as one of your application requirements. You can spend $2,500 plus travel. You can spend $99 for high quality self study materials. You can pay almost any amount in between for almost any flavor and format of training you’d prefer.
• You must apply to take the exam. That application could be turned down if you don’t have all the requirements met. You’re going to spend time just preparing your exam application to prove that you are qualified to pay PMI to take the exam. The requirements on in the PMP Handbook.
• Your application might get audited, requiring more steps verify the information you put on your application. I recommend assuming that you’ll be audited and having all the verifiers lined up and prepped. I’ll explain below.

After you get through those hurdles — which should be a cinch for any PM worth his salt — then you’ll have a 1-year approval to schedule and take your PMP exam. It’s perfectly reasonable — even advisable — to get your requirements met and application approved before you embark on the heavy-duty study, unless you’re embarking on a “boot camp”style training, then you should follow their timing recommendations. Once approved, you have a year to take the exam and certify.

Requirment: Tracking PM Hours

One of the application requirements that gave me real heartache was how to count my PM hours over a 7-year period. I wanted to be sure that the hours I reported were completely defensible. It’s that whole ethics thing, eh. So, not having kept an hour-by-hour log of my project work for 7 years, which would have had to include a categorization of the leading and directing projects broken in to 5 process groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing, I had to come up with a way to extrapolate that responsibly. (And if any of you actually do have such a detailed and categorized log, well, OMG!)

Remember, PMI doesn’t care about your “project experience;” they care about your “project management” experience — your experience “leading and directing” projects. Many PMs, including those in the Cottage PM space, lead and direct projects and also produce other work in the project which is not “leading and directing.” That’s OK, but you need to report to PMI your “leading and directing” time.

So, I built myself a spreadsheet — Type A much? — that considered the following:

• Groups of related projects (I had 5 different projects through 7 years relating to a CRM deployment: the initial deployment, user acceptance training events over 3 years, a major revision of the training materials, etc.)
• Start and End dates (years) for each project — you’ll need that for the application, I think.
• # months on the project — that let me account for partial years lest I overstate.
• # work hours per month (assuming 20 8-hour days — you can assume more hours/day, of course, but this gave me a reasonable, conservative estimate)
• % of my work-month, on average, spent on that project (including but not limited to “leading and directing”)
• % of that project work that was “leading and directing”
• The name of the “verifier” for each project or project group (to help me prep for possible application audit)
• % of the resulting PM time spend on the 5 process groups.

Then, I let the spreadsheet do the math. Here’s an image of a sample spreadsheet like that:

Calculating PM Hours for PMP Exam Application - click for larger image

OK, so it’s way overkill. But it satisfied my need to “police” myself and make sure that I was not misleading anyone or over-estimating my PM time. Given the conservative estimates and weighting factors at every step, I was content that it was a reasonable, ethical, defensible estimate.

I also found that I had a lot more hours than I expected to have, even with all the conservative weighting, so I was able to pick the 2 big ones and use only those on the application since they provided enough hours to meet the requirement.

Audit Prep

Most of the audit items would be fairly simple: provide a copy of the masters degree and the required 35 contact hours (training), etc. But verifying those PM hours — that’s something you really should put some thought to before you apply.

This overkill exercise also let me prepare confidently for a possible application audit. I took the management sponsors or overall PM (when I was a sub-project PM, for example) as the verifiers for the 2 projects. I extracted the meaningful detail for just that project and sent an explanation to the verifier in email. I told him I was applying for the PMP exam. As part of that exam, I was reporting on the time I’d spend leading and directing projects. Since I was using projects that they’d sponsored, if that application were audited, they would need to verify in a formal fashion that my report was correct. Then I gave them the hours and some breakdown and asked if that matched their perspective and if they’d be willing to sign off on that if they were asked. Of course, I also followed up in person.

Now, the PMP application audits are a random thing. It is flagged (or not) for audit as soon as you submit the online application — real time.

And sure enough, as soon as I hit submit on my application, the web page notified me that I was being audited. And you know what? No stress. My application was complete, accurate, and defensible. The only stress is that it extended the application time. The application is not passed on for review until the audit is completed. After the audit is passed, then PMI reviews the application and approves or not. That can take a few weeks, and that’s why I say apply early, before you even start the heavy-duty study prep.

Audit Process

Obviously, all of these process steps I describe may change over time as PMI adjusts and refines its processes. When I was audited, the web site immediately provided me full instructions and 2 downloaded PDFs — one for each of the 2 submitted projects — that my named verifiers were required to sign. In true academic style, the verifies had to sign the verification form, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, then sign across the envelope seal. However, I was able to retain control of the process by then taking the signed-sealed-signed envelope myself and sending it to PMI with the other audit materials. That’s really good process.

Conclusion

I hope that this overkill process will give you some idea of how to track and report on your PM hours responsible if you’re embarking on PMP certification. You certainly don’t have to go quite so far on a detailed estimate. But whatever method you use, you should make sure that your estimates and reporting are fully ethical and fully defensible.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Recent PMP Exam Prep Failures