Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

While I was preparing for my PMP, I was shown a fantastic way to structure a brain dump sheet that I thought I’d share.  When you take your PMP exam, you’re given 6 sheets of paper, 2 pencils, and a calculator.  Pretty much every PMP training program andbook out there will tell you that the first thing you should do when you sit down is do a brain dump.  

A brain dump is taking everything you’ve crammed into your head over the last several days or week and dumping out onto one of the sheets of paper so that you don’t forget it when trying to take the test.  I developed my brain dump cheat sheet early on in my preparation, and I practiced it every day for 3 weeks prior to taking my exam.  I would just begin my study time by performing a brain dump in a spiral notebook.  I’d go as far as I could remember, and then I’d go back and re-read the previous day’s dump to fill in the gaps.  Then I’d do it again the next day.  The point was not to remember everything right away, but to remember as much as I could so that I could get as far into my dump as possible when sitting for the actual test itself.

So what went into my brain dump?  For starters, the most complex part of the test, for me, was recalling all of the different formulas.  So here’s what I did.  Starting with a blank sheet, I’d draw two lines, giving me three columns.  I would then build a grid, like an Excel worksheet.  In the upper right hand cell, I’d write “cost”.  In the cell immediately to the left I’d write “schedule”.  These acted as headers for the first few formulas I was going place in the grid. Now comes the fun part, filling in the gaps.  The first 4 rows are dedicated to the Schedule and Cost headers.  The remaining rows are simple, three part break downs of the calculations needed (meaning that the schedule and cost headers do not apply).

This simple little worksheet made it so that I did have to try to remember the formulas while I in the middle of trying to solve the particular question.  So if a question came up and said something to the effect of “EAC=10 BAC=15.  What is the VAC?”, I’d just look up the formula on my sheet and do the math.  Now, the questions weren’t quite that striaght forward in all cases, in fact they were more likely to give me the CPI and the BAC numbers and have me calculate the EAC in order to find the answer for VAC, or something to that effect.

You can also expand the column idea to include the 5 process groups (as the column headers), the 9 knowledge areas (as the far left hand row headers) and then fill in the gaps:

You gotta love the grid for breaking down complex information into small, bite-sized pieces!  Now, there are gaps in the 5×9, i.e. there’s no “implementation” item for the “time” knowledge area, so know all of the key areas and fill the blanks with X’s and you’ll be OK.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 11:15 am and is filed under Management, PMP, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.