Easy PDU Collection #2: Research Project Management Literature

In the first part of this series, we already covered how PDUs can be collected by reading books and writing book reviews.

In this follow-up, we want to dig a bit deeper into the fact that research in general is a great way of collecting those PDUs still missing to maintain the PMP certification status.

PMI recognizes the time put into reading project management literature in the PDU sub-category “reading” under “education” (as opposed to the other main category “giving back to the profession”, meaning providing valuable input for the community of project managers around the world), in the form of a PDU grant for PMP certification holders.

Consequently, our second recommendation is:

Be a project management literature researcher!

Take Lisa, for example. Lisa is a project manager working for a global corporation and was PMP-certified 32 months ago. She has since then participated in the organization of some of her local PMI chapter events and attended a seminar on multi project management, and that way, she has been able to collect 50 PDUs. Until her 3-year renewal cycle ends, she will need 10 more PDUs to maintain her status. For this, she also has to keep in mind that she needs to cover all areas from her talent triangle (Technical Project Management Skills, Leadership Skills, and Strategic Business Management Skills) that is valid as a basis for collecting PDUs in the Education categories since December of 2015.

Lisa wants to find new, not too costly ways to collect these missing PDUs and at the same time expand her project management knowledge. She decides to focus on the Education category called "Read". She wants to study books and report the contents and results of her research to PMI. She takes the following steps for that purpose:

She selects books to read. From her PMP exam preparation process, Lisa remembers some titles of which she read several chapters to accompany her studies. Back then, she thought about some of these books that she would like to read them more thoroughly in the future. They have the following titles:

1. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling, 11th Edition by Harold Kerzner (ISBN: 978-1118022276)
2. Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, 7th Edition by Robert K. Wysocki (ISBN: 978-1118729168)   
3. Managing Projects in Organizations: How to Make the Best Use of Time, Techniques, and People, 3rd Edition by J. Davidson Frame (ISBN: 978-0787968311)
4. Situational Project Management: The Dynamics of Success and Failure by Oliver F. Lehmann (ISBN: 978-1498722612)
5. Interpersonal Skills for Portfolio, Program, and Project Managers by Ginger Levin (ISBN: 978-1567262889)

The books she selects help her cover all three aspects of her personal talent triangle. For example, Kerzner’s book contains a lot of information on Technical Project Management Skills such as Earned Value Analysis, Levin’s book helps her broaden her knowledge of Leadership Skills such as communicating organizational change, and several sections of Lehmann’s book cover Strategic Business Management Skills such as handling complexity and learning about contracting.

While reading, she keeps a written transcript of her activities and her findings. This step is especially important, as it

• can serve as a document of proof to PMI that the activity actually happened
• enables her to recall the most important information if necessary or needed (for example in case of a PDU audit by PMI)
• makes the reading process more fruitful: Lisa will be able to better memorize the information she is reading and have it available when she needs it.

Keeping a transcript means that Lisa writes down the start and end times and dates of her reading activities, the details on when she read which titles and, very importantly, notes about the content, for example by answering the following questions:

1. What did I read?
2. What pages did I read in that?
3. What did the author communicate?
4. What did I learn from it?
5. What is my personal opinion on that?

She reports her results. After having finished her reading sessions, she reports the activity to PMI from her CCRS dashboard at ccrs.pmi.org by going to “Report PDUs” and selecting "Read”. She lists the authors and titles separated by commas into the respective fields and pastes the content of her protocol into the description field. Since it cannot be more than 4000 characters long, she shortens her text where possible. However, she keeps the full protocol as a document on her computer in case PMI requires her to deliver further proof, and in any case as a valuable addition to her own records of project management knowledge gathering. Continuing with reporting her PDUs, as she dedicated three and a half hours to read about each of her talent triangle topics, she assigns 3.5 PDUs in each of the fields at the bottom of the form. This way, she can claim 10.5 PDUs. The .5 PDU that exceeds the maximum Lisa needs will go into her next renewal cycle.

By the way, it is also recommendable to publish these results. If PMI asks for evidence during an audit, the publication can serve as additional evidence.

If you decide to follow this advice, it should not be too difficult for you to obtain your missing PDUs, and it is definitively not a costly exercise.

For more tips and hints, feel free to also follow us on Twitter.

Also in this series:

• Easy PDU Collection #1: Read and Review Books
• Easy PDU Collection #3: Online Media – Webinars, Online Conferences, Podcasts, PM Games

Contact the authors on LinkedIn:

• Oliver F. Lehmann, MSc., PMP
• Antje Lehmann-Benz, M.A., PMP

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PS. In all of your activities, make sure to always adhere to the PMI Code Ethics and Professional Conduct.