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Should I study for the PMP exam?

I've been considering studying for the PMP exam.  So today in the bookstore I browsed a few PMP exam prep books.   Having just finished a master's in organizational leadership that has quite a focus on teams, I decided to look for areas of overlap.  Places where the PMP aspects of building a team and helping the team perform would be an easy read for me given my recent experience in gradual school.

I found a few pages in the exam prep books - less than 10 total.  They briefly covered Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Tuckman's Stages of Group Development,  Vroom's Expectancy Theory of Motivation, etc.  All very good stuff.  Having spent a year studying this 10 pages or less, appeared rather brief for an exam guide that wishes to prepare a project manager to optimize a project's performance.

In one guide the process of Manage Project Team is defined:

"3.5.5 Manage Project Team

Manage Project Team is the process of tracking team member performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and managing changes to optimize project performance."



The goal, optimize project performance, appears very sound.  However when one examines the primary tool used to achieve optimization, that of tracking team member performance, one has to imagine some form of individual performance assessment.  Hasn't the world of management realized that the tool of bludgeoning the worker with performance reviews will only worsen the overall performance of the group?  Perhaps the PMI should read Vroom's Expectancy theory.

So is there added value in an Agile team leader to be a certified PMP?

Comments

Carlos said…
The excerpt's title says "Manage Project Team", but the detail says "tacking team *member* performance". In my view, it doesn't match. If you are managing a team, you can only measure the entire team's performance, not the performance of the individual members. Of course, you can measure each member's *contribution* to the team's performance. I might be nitpicking here, but I truly believe wording is not inconsequential. If people are working as a team, individuals contribute, and the team performs. Then you should not measure individual members' performance, only contributions. And from what I've seen of PMP, there are a lot of things like this that are contrary to Agile ideas, the way Y generation works, or the reality of most software development projects.

I asked myself the same question, and I decided that there is little value in PMP for an agilist. There is far more value in writing a blog about Agile, or commenting someone else's Agile blog ;-)