books:

	PgMP: Program Management Professional Exam Study Guide Paul Sanghera Sybex, 2007 - 449 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Special Features: Hundreds of review questions with fully explained answers A complete practice exam with fully explained answers The real world scenarios to help you deal with the program management issues in the real world and also to answer the scenario based questions in the exam Notes and tips to highlight the crucial points Exam?s Eye View section at the end of each chapter to emphasize the important points from the exam?s perspective Key Terms section at the end of each chapter that lists the important terms and concepts introduced in the chapter along with their definitions The exam objectives fully explained before their coverage in each chapter

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A Must for the PgMP Exam and a Must for all Program Managers

I've read this book from cover to cover and the PgMP exam? Tough! Been there, done that. My recommendation: this book is a must to prepare for the exam just like the Program Management Standard is. I'm puzzled at a couple of harshly negative reviews about this book: useless, waste of time, dry? These words do not describe this book....I have read other books from Dr. Paul Sanghera as well, and I love his style that puts life into even dead boring topics and make them interesting. Same is true about this book. All concepts are explained well and woven together, and there is a perfect logical flow...it's almost like reading a story... If the inputs and outputs for a process are re-organized to help you make sense, and explained why they are there, I think it's a feature and not a problem...

I do agree however that the questions in the exam are much more difficult than the one in the book, but the book presents the material that you must know before taking the exam...In the exam, of course, your experience will count..no book can substitute for that...This material can be obtained from different references, scattered around...but the book does an excellent job to put all the pieces together and integrate them seamlessly... The author should be congratulated for that...Another great PLUS of this book is that it"s organized along the official exam specifications.
Actually I would recommend this book even if you are not planning to take the exam; it's a great program management book, too.. All program managers should have it on their desk. Program Management Standard will make much more sense after reading this book.

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Very Useful Book

I have read this book from cover to cover and found it the best of all the available PgMP and Program Management books. All of us are entitled to our opinions, but I would take those reviews with a grain of salt that blast (trash) this book to advertise the competitor products. Here is my balanced view: you will do yourself a great service if you go through this book very carefully before taking the exam. Of course, you can use other resources and products as well. There are three things that this book does and no other book on this topic does: 1.) It integrates the otherwise scattered information within the scope of the PgMP exam into one place and makes sense of it all (as some other reviewers noticed); 2.) It is organized along the official exam objectives; 3.) The material is presented in such a logical way that while preparing for the exam, you also learn the basics of program management.
That said, I agree with another reviewer that PgMP is a difficult exam. None of the resources is going to substitute for our experience.
I highly recommend this book for the exam and also just for learning the basics of program management.

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Program Management: Objective & structured approach

Being involved in one of the huge program of deploying an unified business model on a global scale, I was looking for a knowledge source to fit in and relate what we do in practice and what is generally accepted practice in the field. That is how I stumbled on this book (basically I decided to buy this after reading the reviews in Amazon). Since I have to agree with most of the reviews already put in there (especially those positive ones), I try to provide my views avoiding the ones already indicated by other reviewers.

1. If you really need to venture into this book, one important aspect is to understand the concept of how it is structured. Probably the author would have treated, creation of this book itself as a program, one can immediately recognise the structured approach, depth of knowledge & experience of author on the subject matter (probably one of the reason why some times the topics appear to be repeated or too detailed), effort to make it easy to understand (repeated definitions instead of cross referencing - this could probably help from exam perspective, only if you understand the structure and not get confused by such repetitions)and so on. Without understanding the basic framework of the book structure, I struggled in the beginning which slowed down my reading pace. But once I discovered it (by plotting the key learnings on a mind map) that most of the repetitions are basically due to spliting each chapter contents into 2 broad (but related) categories namely - 1. Program Phases 2. Process groups with included processes & Knowledge areas supporting those process groups & Program stages, then I could see and link the repetitions easily and logically (and hence realised, many things are repeated since once they are explained under program phases and they are again covered under process / process groups / knowledge areas). In fact, analysing and connecting them using mindmap technique also helped me create a complete summary of the whole program management concept for easy and quick reference (even from exam perspective, such a reference would be very good reference for revision, I believe)

2. On one hand the book extensively covers the conceptual frame work, what it appeared to lack in many places is - examples or illustrations (though there are some real world scenerio's here and there, but not extensive). What I mean here is, while the 39 program management processes covered follows the structured conceptual approach of 1.Inputs, 2.Tools & Techniques & 3.Outputs, if you look for some examples within this framework you may be disappointed (For example: you read the term -detailed program scope statement many times, but if you are looking for a concrete example of a detailed scope statement to understand it better, then you may be disappointed). To be fair, I don't see this as a negative aspect of this book because, having written this book from examination perspective, the 'detailed scope definition of book contents' itself would have been a limiting factor in including such examples (though this could have been an excellent value addition to the CD attached, if not in book pages)

3. Though I could have made a choice of other books on program management, one of the reason I wanted to see the books targted at PgMP exam was: in such books, there is more gurantee that the contents are probably well adhered to the generally accepted body of knowledge (in this case, with the PMI definitions of program management); thus, benchmarking of my own experience would be against such professional body of knowledge. On the other hand, if needed - it also helps to get certified (though,secondary benefit in my case for now). From that perspective, I should say I am extremely satisfied with this book (It did reaffirm many of my beliefs and experiences in one hand, while filling some gaps in understanding and knowledge areas on the other. Not to forget the help it provided in aligning my own knowledge and experience to the professional definitions and body of knowledge).

4. From PgMP certification perspective itself, what I see as limitation in this book is : it only focus on the exam preparation stage of certification (i.e. evaluation level 2). It wont provide guidelines or help in terms of either evaluation level 1(application review) or evaluation level 3 (MRA - multi rater assessment). Once again, this could be due to the scope definition of this book. In that sense, I would say - it is not an one-in-all book for PgMP certification, but a good reference on the PgMP certification exam part.

5. In summary, this is one of the book that I would strongly recommend to be included in your program management refererences (either from exam perspective or from understanding of program management concept perspective). Not,if you are looking for some detailed practical tools & utilities that you could quickly pick and adopt for your usage (anyway, that is not the purpose for which such exam oriented books are written).

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My views:

The content of the book are excellent and well elaborated, but unfortunatly I found after taking the real exam that the simulation test questions provided in the book has nothing to do with the real test questions which are based on real scenario questions rather than a straight forward input output questions.

I suggest to all to buy other books in the market.

Good luck.


reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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