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Neall Alcott, Springhouse Education and Consulting Services VP of Technology, has been invited to speak at the PMI World Congress, October 18-21, 2008. Neall will be sharing the speaking bill with other Enterprise Project Management (EPM) experts and will feature a keynote address by Former U.S. Secretary of State and World Leader Colin Powell.
Springhouse’s expertise in deployment and support of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management suite of tools has raised Springhouse to be recognized as a premiere partner. In addition to the presentation at the PMI World Congress, Springhouse is also presenting on EPM topics at the regional EPM Conferences held in the Philadelphia and Washington, DC markets throughout October.
Neall will be presenting on the topic of Mitigating Project Risk through Microsoft Project Certification. His talk will introduce new certification processes, share the success metrics that come with certification, and outline the certification process.
“We are excited that organizations are seeing the value of training and certification in mitigating risk on major projects,” says Alcott, “Our experience has proven that Client Satisfaction is consistently higher for those teams with high concentrations of Microsoft certified team members. Our goal at Springhouse is to provide those skills to help get teams to that level of knowledge, efficiency and validation.”
Read More about the PMI World Congress.
About Springhouse Education and Consulting Services
Springhouse, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Learning Solutions and a PMI Registered Education Provider (REP), has provided world-class education & consulting services since 1989. Our trainers & consultants are experienced in both real-world implementations and professional classroom education techniques, resulting in the highest quality learning experience available! Visit Springhouse on the web at http://www.springhouse.com.
For More Information Contact:
Jeff Tincher
PRINFO@springhouse.com
www.springhouse.com
610-321-2090
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Filed Under Project Management |
Many new users to MS Project, or any other project management tool for that matter, do not set baselines for their project files. Without a baseline, however, a you can never really accurately gauge performance on the project. For instance, you won’t see variances or earned value data.
A baseline is what I call an original snapshot of your project. When you set a baseline (MS Project 2007 calls it ‘Set baseline’; all previous versions refer to it as ‘Save baseline’), you are essentially saving Start, Finish, Duration, Work, and Cost data for the entire project, each subproject, and each subtask.
Although you may have multiple baselines for each project (up to 11 baselines in MS Project), nearly all of my clients and students only have a need for one. I usually recommend only using one anyway since there is no quick way to extract those other baselines without additional configuration. Anyway, I’ll save that topic for another day.
In the meantime, here are some general best practices for setting baselines:
- Set your baseline when you are ready to begin the project. That means when it has been approved, the day before, the morning of, etc…
- Only clear baselines when you don’t want to see baseline data in your tables and views. Otherwise, simply set the baseline again and MS Project will overwrite the previous baseline.
- If you have new tasks during the project, you can save a baseline on only those tasks so you don’t have to save the baseline for the entire project.
- Interim plans are similar to baselines but MS Project only saves Start and Finish data.
Filed Under Microsoft Project, Project Management, Project Server |
Skipping Questions on Your PMP Exam
By Gabe Y
A commonly asked question when I teach my PMP exam prep course is “When I’m taking the PMP exam, can I skip the questions that I don’t know?”
Let’s take some of the guesswork out of that. You should never skip any question on the exam! That’s because you are not penalized for wrong answers (unlike the SAT exam you took way back in high school).
In the current version of the PMP exam, you have four choices for each of the 200 questions. If you know the answer for a question, choose an answer and move on. If you don’t know the answer, or at least not totally confident of the answer, choose an answer anyway and mark the question before moving on, which can be done by simply clicking the little checkbox in the corner of your screen.
You’ll have an opportunity to come back to all your marked questions later to review your choice. Throughout the rest of the exam, other questions may trigger your memory for the marked questions.
Just remember to choose what you feel is the best answer before moving on, just in case you don’t have time to get back to that question. You definitely don’t want to submit the exam with blank answers. Afterall, a 25% chance of getting a question correct is better than 0%, right?
Springhouse PMP Courses:
PMI Project Management Course (5 days)
Filed Under Project Management |
PMP Passing Score?
By Gabe Y
This is a question I get a lot…”What is the passing score for the PMP?”
The reason why there’s confusion is that different materials may have different answers Let me make it easy for you.
PMBOK 2000 (old version of exam) = 69%
PMBOK 3rd ed. (new version of exam) = 81%
PMBOK 3rd ed. (new version of exam after the first few months of release) = 61%
I remember telling my students a few years ago that they better apply for the PMP soon since you never know what you’re going to get in the new version. When the new version finally came out, 81% was the passing score. However, based on the candidates’ scores, PMI realized that people who should be passing weren’t passing! Rather than updating the entire exam, they lowered the passing score. The 61% was determined the appropriate passing score after reviewing several months of data.
However, prep books and other materials that were printed obviously were not updated. That’s why you may see varying passing scores.
In short (until PMI changes it again), you need 61% to pass.
Springhouse PMP Courses:
PMI Project Management Course (5 days)
Filed Under Project Management |
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