Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Sponge-Worthy: Tips for obtaining Free PDUs for Continuing PMP Certification

Lo and Behold... People... I'm PMI re-certified (or almost there at least).

I completed my PMI certification in April 2004 and was expected to collect 60 PDUs in next 3 years to remain a PMI certified. Happy to share with you that I managed to acquire, report and obtain approval for 64 PDUs for the period of 2004 - 2007 and I get to carry over 4 PDUs for the next cycle. Only just I should say... razor thin gap and in time for my annual appraisal.

Next part is most important and free loader like me really enjoy - all the PDUs were obtained without spending any money other than time and fuel to travel. Honestly I did learn quite a few things on the way, which I would not have, if getting the PDUs were not a goal. So, thank you PMI for motivating me. (and of course, my employer - Software Paradigms International)

Also, getting PDUs is not very hard. It's matter of tracking it properly and then remembering to report it correctly.

In the next few paras, I'll talk about how I went about doing it and then in the next section, I will offer more avenues, I plan to explore for next cycle (and you can too!)

Being what you are: 15 PDUs

Good news... if you are project manager or play a role in managing projects. One-quarter of your work is already done.

Being a PMP certified Project Management Practitioner, I earned 5 PDUs every year. So from year 2004 - 2007, I earned 15 PDUs.

Report that under category - 2H (Practitioner of Professional Project Management Services)


Sharing your knowledge: 30 PDUs

Become a trainer, a mentor and/or a speaker on Project Management and PMP certification. You get high marks for this. Sharing and spreading the skills and knowledge of Project Management is important part of being a PMP.

I earned that as :

(a) A guest speaker on Project Management Professional training class
I spoke on how I prepared for PMP exam and took up the topic of Project Scheduling and Critical Path Calculation with the participants. (Special Credits to my colleague - Jitendra Ram here inviting me to be a guest speaker) - 10 Points

(b) Trainer for Microsoft Project 2003
I extensively use Microsoft Project for planning and tracking project resources and schedules, in addition to my employer's own Enterprise Project Management tool - spiProject. But I was surprised to learn not many project managers use MS Project effectively or if at all.

So, using some real life examples that I use on my project and armed with some advanced techniques in Microsoft Project, I trained my peers in use of MS Project. - 10 points

(c) A presenter on Project Management topic at the company strategy meeting.
My employer is in strategic partnership with several channel partners and it place special level of responsibility on end customer facing resources. My topic was the common pitfalls, I faced during my assignment and how I overcame that and specifically highlight how being a PMP and specific project management techniques helped. - 10 points


Reading and sharing - Self Learning: 15 PDUs
It helps if you are a avid reader and a good notes taker.

Over the past of couple of years, I read on project management and business. Notable of there being
- World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman
- Reimagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age by Tom Peters.

Both are excellent reads and deservingly best sellers. It is possible to relate these books to several key areas in project management especially communication, resource management and risk.


Free Seminars and Local PMI Chapter Dinner Meetings: 4 PDUs

Both these events are excellent sources of earning PDUs.

I must admit about PMI Atlanta dinner, I did get lucky. My employer was the gold sponsor for the PMI monthly dinner and I got the benefit of that to attend one of most interesting seminars (How to be a better consultant/Carl Pritchard ) and show off my sales acumen. - 1 PDU.

The second seminar I attended was sponsored by Dekker Ltd. It was a half day course on Earned Value Management and how to apply MS Project and software tools from Dekker to it. It was long drive to south side of Atlanta for me, but it was worth it. Check out their website for more half day seminars.

The ones, I missed

Now, these are events, I missed reporting because I did not keep good notes on them.

I guess that is lessons learned for next time.

Other Avenues to try
I plan to explore these avenues this cycle as well the tried and tested ones too.

  • Free Webinars: Nothing better than to learn sitting at your desk. There are several vendors offering these free webinars in order to entice new customers for their products or services.
  • Volunteering Opportunities: Find some at your local PMI chapters.

Of course, as always... .START EARLY.... !!!

That always helps to cut down on the last minute rush. Of course, you would know the benefit of planning, after all you are PMP...:)

Hope you find this blog entry shared something useful for you and should get you started on the PDU hunt...

GOOD LUCK!


Sunday, December 02, 2007

WAMPing now: My First Pure Open Source project

I have been working with Microsoft .NET technologies for a while (6 years now), so it is easy for people to assume that that live and breath... in CLR (Common Language Runtime) world... :D and probably despise the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) planets and all the revolves around OSS (Open Source Software) planet systems.

Well the truth is, I do... do lots of my day-to-day work using .NET because that's the assignments I have been put on to win my "daily" bread. I use lots of Open Source .NET technologies like NAnt, NUnit, NHibernate to name a few, which has their in the Java/OSS world. Add to the fact, I did lots of J2ME and J2EE work before moving over to Microsoft's .NET platform.

Besides, it always pays to keep an eye out to the "dishes on the other table".

Dishes on the other table being - Java and J2EE being the obvious choice, but there are lot of open source technology to watch out for including dynamic languages and their associated frameworks like Ruby, PHP, Perl etc.

So, late last week - I delivered my first production ready - xAMP product, which I hope will go live in next couple of weeks.

xAMP stands for:

x - OS of choice.
A - Apache Web Server
M - MySQL database
P - PHP language

The two most known flavors of xAMP - LAMP (Linux based AMP) and WAMP (Windows based AMP). Honestly, about two weeks prior to completing the project (Delivery date: Nov/30/2007) I did not know much about MySQL and had limited knowledge on PHP. But Being a Linux enthusiast, I have played around Apache technologies since college (1997-98).

Anyway the point being I was amazed at how mature the tool set around xAMP platform is and how easy it is pick up.

The development environment I used was Microsoft Vista Home Premium Edition. I feel that Home Premium is more ideal of the Vista platforms as it did not have the IIS Server installed. So, I had to install "A" of the xAMP platform - Apache Web server. Of course, it is not as dysfunctional as Home BASIC and that is just my humble opinion. Also, add to the fact that I did not have much choice. All the other computers at my disposal had issues of HDD space or were just not powerful enough support development tools.

The Vista platform comes with a caveat though and that is its famous User Access Control feature (UAC), which is incorrigibly mistrusting and highly irritating. After much bruises and cuts fighting UAC, I was forced to turn it OFF.

So note to self: Real developers don't need UAC unless you are developing for the Vista box.

That was probably the only glitch I faced in setting up the development tools. (Touch wood!)

The development tool of choice - Eclipse Europa (v3.2 + Goodies in September/October 2007). Downloaded from a link on the IBM website. Additionally downloaded - PHP Development Tools (PDT) add in.

The next step was to download PHP and configure it with the Apache server. Thankfully again this step is well documented on the web. Tons of site offering advice and troubleshooting guidance. Fortunately, I had to face none and nothing in Vista OS conflicted either.

Now for the missing "M". No James Bond story here. (Read "M" is 007's secretive boss). MySQL website was the place to go. I recommend downloading the Community Edition as well as the GUI tool for it.

Also required is the glue between MySQL and PHP - the MySQL PHP connector. That is also available on the MySQL website.

With my limited knowledge of MySQL, I went with default settings. But by the time I got around to building the third table (the first two being lookup value tables), I realized that ISAM engine for the tables will not be correct as it did not support foreign key constraints (FK).

Coming from a SQL Server and Oracle background, I had taken the FK constraint for granted in all databases. Now MySQL does support FKs but only in certain Engines.

Also the idea of being able to use different engines to access and store the table was new to me. It really depends on the type of application that is being planned but this is another level of optimization available to the users in MySQL. I still have to research if MySQL can have tables stored with different engines interact. (Any answers from readers are welcome). But once I shifted the tables to InnoDB Engine, I was in a familiar world.

So off I went developing the application in about 5 -6 days. Honestly, I had made it hard of myself as I had been procrastinating and sidetracked on the project for over 6 weeks and started working on it very close to the deadline.

All said and done, the project was up and running, the user acceptance testing and the demo to the stakeholders went really well.

The application has been delivered with installation instructions from ground up. Just waiting for the application to go live in next couple of weeks and get the mullah... :D

Just to keep the record straight, knowledge of legacy ASP (Active Server Pages) and JSP (Java Server Pages) did help in learning PHP faster as it follows a similar syntax and embedded HTML layout.

I would recommend xAMP platform anybody who is transitioning from a non web background to a web based development. Tools are easy and free to obtain and lots of readily available Internet resources being the major reasons.

Please feel free to drop line, if you have any questions/comments/suggestions/brickbats.

Till next time...hopefully with a story on Ruby...



Footnote - Some Important Links: