Words Matter

During the past nine years, I’ve reviewed over ten thousand PMP exam applications.

And more specifically, a hundred or so applications that were selected for audit, producing comments from the auditor.

These comments usually focus on “show us more leading and directing cross-functional project teams” or “show us less operational and administrative tasks”. Regardless, when submitting revised applications post-audit, I always help students achieve what matters most; replacing generic business terms or their role/company specific terms with project managementy terms.

For example, “I communicated with key business leaders” can be replaced with “I led stakeholder engagement using the Stakeholder Register”, and “I created project performance reports” can be replaced with “I reviewed the project objectives, plan, and increment performance to determine and report project variance, performance, and recommend corrective actions to the team and stakeholders”. Or, “I created the charter” can be replaced with “I directed the creation of a project charter through the Sponsor with the team to formally commission the project and legitimize resource requests”.

See? On our PMP applications, we must use project management terms, concepts, and tools. Project managers use these words to speak about their work “leading and directing cross-functional project teams” doing “temporary, unique project work”, not “operational and administrative” work.