ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we get together to address the topics that matter most to you as a professional project manager.  Our conversations touch on getting certified, avoiding pitfalls in the business, and creating ongoing successes.

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, not to be outdone by the politicians, we have an October or November surprise of our own:  Papergate.  Does this rise to the level of scandal?

ANDY CROWE:  I would not go that far, Nick.  I don’t think so.  This was a clarification of a policy from the Project Management Institute that you’re referring to.  But I don’t think it goes so far as a scandal.  It’s turned a lot of people upside down, perhaps.

NICK WALKER:  All right.  So let’s get into this.  What is Papergate?  Did you come up with this, Bill, this term?

BILL YATES:  I can neither confirm nor deny that I came up with that term.  Yeah, what we had was there is a practice, when you go in to take an exam; you have a 15-minute tutorial that takes place before the clock starts ticking down on your actual exam time.

ANDY CROWE:  A tutorial of what?  Explain that.

BILL YATES:  A tutorial is really – it’s showing you how to navigate.  As you’re taking the exam, it’s administered on a computer, and you have to know how to use a mouse.  You have to know it’s A, B, C, or D.  How do I click on it?

NICK WALKER:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  When I click on the next button, what happens?

NICK WALKER:  So the logistics of taking the test itself.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  And it is fairly intuitive.  One of the things that we have encouraged our students to do in the past is to take advantage of the 15 minutes and do a brain dump.  And by that we have formulas that are very important for the exam.  We have keywords, mnemonics, trigger words, different things.

ANDY CROWE:  Acronyms.

BILL YATES:  Acronyms.  The practice is to dump that information on the scratch sheet of paper that is provided at the exam center during that tutorial time.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.

ANDY CROWE:  And the reason we do that is so, for instance, if you have a formula down in front of you, you may have three, four, five questions on the exam that ultimately reference that formula.  You don’t have to recall it each time.  You don’t have to start second-guessing yourself.  AnYou do it at the beginning.  Your mind’s fresh.  Because by the end your mind’s going to be kind of pulpy anyway, and so you do it when your mind is fresh.  You get that information down.  And then it’s there.  And then you can refer back to it with some confidence and some ease and some quickness of recall.

BILL YATES:  And speaking of confidence, I like to encourage students to do the brain dump because it puts you in a confident mood or attitude towards the exam.  You’re able to walk out of the car, come in and be frisked at the Prometric Center, and provide all the right check-in protocol.  And then you sit down, and your anxiety level is really high.  By doing the brain dump, you’re able to produce something on paper.  So you’re getting, kinesthetically, you’re getting involved in it; and you’re relieving some of the stress; and you’re building some of that data that you can refer back to during the exam.

NICK WALKER:  And does the feedback from people who’ve taken the test show that this has been effective?

ANDY CROWE:  Very.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s a good practice.  So we had a curveball.

NICK WALKER:  Uh-oh.

BILL YATES:  So PMI came back and said we’ve had a change in policy.  And now at all Prometric Centers, when you go to take the exam, during the 15-minute tutorial you’re not allowed to take paper and pencil that’s provided at the exam center.  You’re not allowed to do that brain dump.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  So that kind of changes a lot of the way that peopl...