ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● WENDY CAPERTON
NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers, for project managers. It’s a chance for us to get together every couple of weeks and have a conversation about what matters to you as a professional project manager. We’ll cover subjects such as project management certification and hear some real-life stories from folks involved in project management every day. I’m your host, Nick Walker. And with me are two guys who can each rightfully claim the title of project manager’s project manager. They are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.
So Andy and Bill, you two know the ins and outs, the ups and downs of project management. You’ve both earned multiple certifications and taken multiple exams in your time. But I have a question for you. And please don’t take this, you know, as a statement of a lack of confidence or a lack of trust. But come on. Nobody can know everything. Can you? I mean, are there some – there’s some tough questions on these exams. It’s hard to believe anyone could get a perfect score. So Andy, what do you do when you just have to guess at an answer?
ANDY CROWE: And Nick, it happens to everybody. It’s really funny when you get into these exams. You feel like you’re incredibly prepared. And a universal experience that Bill and I talk to a lot of people, they have this experience almost across the board. They get in, they sit down, start the exam, and the first five questions or so they have no idea. And a lot of that is a little bit of a confidence issue. But anybody who has gone through the exam has probably, if they were being honest, experienced that. So you do have to guess. You have to have a guessing strategy. You have to be ready for those eventualities.
For me, part of the challenge here is I think everybody’s different. I think this has to be a little bit tailored to who you are, your level of preparation. So I’ll give you an example. I have pretty good instincts for questions. Now, my wife Karen has incredible instincts for answering questions. She could sit down and take a test, probably not being prepared, and she’s just really good at standardized tests. I’m not to that level. But I’ve got good instincts on these project management exams. Part of it is learning to think a little bit like PMI thinks and like the test creators think, think about the exploits that they’re going to go for, think about if I were writing this question, how would I try and exploit the trap and things like that, where would I set up the trap.
So I’ve got good instincts. But my problem is, given enough time, I’ll talk myself out of the right answer. So regularly I will come up with the right answer, mark it, I’ll know it when I see it. And then I’ll stare at the question, and the wheels begin to turn. And I’ll think, oh, you know what, maybe it’s something else. Bill, have you ever had that happen?
BILL YATES: Yeah, Andy, I certainly have. And it cracks me up, too, to a couple things that I want to touch on that you mentioned. First, getting in the mindset of the person who wrote the question. That’s a big part of it. And then secondly, too, the tendency of, okay, I can make an argument for this other answer. It looks pretty good, too. So I’m excited that we’re going to talk about this topic of guessing and just share some exploits that have worked for us and for others.
ANDY CROWE: So it’s a common experience, Bill, that you can generally, if you know the subject matter, you can generally knock off one wrong answer immediately.
BILL YATES: Right, Andy. It’s fascinating to me. Again, the student response that we hear consistently is that, when I took the exam, I had so many questions that were typically a scenario-type question, where I could eliminate two of the four answers.
ANDY CROWE: Yeah, right off.
BILL YATES: I knew they were wrong.
