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Your Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential has a three-year cycle during which you are expected to meet the Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) set forth by PMI. |
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| Putting Time on Your Side
Four global professionals reveal how earning their PMP credential has given them the tools and confidence needed to improve their time management skills.
 Since attaining the Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential in 2004, E. Shelley Mendez, PMP, uses her project management skills pertaining to time management both professional and personally.
“I apply the project management process to accomplish all of my goals—starting with selection and prioritization, planning the activity, estimating the time and effort required, checking progress against remaining time and re-evaluating to keep on track,” she says.
Ms. Mendez developed a two-pronged approach to time management. “I think of it as the ‘forward pass, backward pass’ approach,” she says.
First, she estimates the time required to complete the full scope of work. Secondly, she works backward from the deadline to determine what can realistically be accomplished in the available time. “There is usually a gap,” she says.
From there, Ms. Mendez reworks the plan using techniques such as changing the resources, altering the sequencing of activities and grouping the work differently, “until a satisfactory mix is produced that will accomplish the work within the time, cost, quality and risk parameters.” “The importance of planning what needs to be done and by when, and then checking on the progress at intervals, cannot be overstated,” Ms. Mendez says.
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 For Ivo M. Michalick Vasconcelos, PMP, time management is all about picking and choosing. When preparing for the Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential exam in 2004, he quickly learned to manage his time wisely.
“There was a lot of project management- related material I wanted to study during my preparation, but I had to pick and choose what would serve me best at the time,” he says.
Since then, it has been an ongoing learning process to perfect these skills. “I had to learn—and this is a continuous process—to do more and better in less time,” he says.
Mr. Vasconcelos has found that sometimes the most important time management skill is learning to say “no” or ask for help. As vice president of certification and technical studies for the PMI Minas Gerais, Brazil Chapter, he was given added responsibility when the chapter expanded last year. He soon realized his duties as founder and moderator of CMM-Brasil, a Yahoo! discussion group focused on software projects, would suffer.
“I invited three colleagues to help me handle CMM-Brasil and do things for it that I haven’t had the time before, such as conducting polls and keeping updated links,” he says. “This allowed me to devote some extra time to the chapter.”
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 Before obtaining the Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential in 2001, Alexander Matthey, PMP, had worked for more than 16 years as a project manager. But in the early part of his career, the time management skills he practiced were limited to those he learned through Microsoft Project. “I tried to fit project management into a mold,” he says.
Earning the PMP certification has allowed Mr. Matthey to form a network of fellow credential holders who continually share best practices and recommend tools and literature for improving his skills in this area.
“Your technical skills will get you one-third of the way; you go the rest of the way through the knowledge you get from relationships,” he says.
Mr. Matthey passes along these time management techniques and best practices to those not fully acquainted with project management—teaching PMP credential exam courses in multiple countries and sharing with less experienced practitioners the resources that he finds useful. “This networking becomes an extension of my own experience,” Mr. Matthey says. “The PMP credential is a catalyst for that.”
Above all, Mr. Matthey has found that motivation is key when it comes to time management. If the desire and determination to complete a task is there, project managers will find creative ways to allocate sufficient time and resources, he says. And in many cases, his network of peers has provided this motivation.
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Michael Schweitzer, PMP, has managed projects in the Asia Pacific region for more than 26 years. But since earning the Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential in 2001, he has developed a true appreciation for and in-depth comprehension of time management skills.
“I have developed a greater understanding of the time, cost and quality relationship,” he says.
Preparing for the PMP certification exam taught him to allocate realistic time parameters to tasks, as well as the importance of managing that allotted time. “This is applicable in assigning time to an element in a work breakdown structure, as well as in determining the amount of time spent on a single question on a timed exam,” he says.
Since earning the PMP, Mr. Schweitzer has learned to replace “to-do” lists with scheduled tasks. “Instead of managing a list of things to do, I schedule time in my daily work calendar to actually complete the tasks,” he says.
But Mr. Schweitzer realizes that obtaining the PMP credential is by no means the end of the road. “I participate in continued training programs to learn and apply new time management techniques on an ongoing basis,” he says.
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