Will PMP improve my abilities

[durga kokkonda]

I worked earlier nearly 2 years back as a project lead and handled 3 projects successfully with in a span of 1 1/2 years without any prior project management experience. However all the three projects were Fixed Bid projects which were developed based on RAD model(Rapid application develipment) and Prototype models.

Now I moved to US and working on Contract jobs and do not get much opportunities to manage any projects.

My question to the group is will the PMP certification help to lead and manage large and complex projects?
Will my earlier project management experience be sufficient to take up the PMP certification? FYI I have a Bachelors Degree with nearly 8 years IT experience and definitely more than 4500Hrs project management experience but not recently.
Please reply.

Thanks,
Durga.

[Andrew Stellman]

First of all, it definitely sounds like you are a good candidate for the PMP exam. Your experience matches very closely the profile for many other successful PMPs we've talked to. And based on what you've done in the past, I'm guessing that you will be able to pick up the material pretty well.

So will the PMP certification help you manage large projects? Definitely. There are a lot of techniques that you'll see -- such as earned value management and many of the quality tools and techniques -- that make a lot of sense in large projects.

But more importantly, there's a very heavy emphasis on change management -- controlling changes, and identifying what changes to include in the project. Anyone who's done work in an agile environment understands how important it is to recognize important project changes, and make sure that the important changes make it into the code... and, just as importantly, which changes should not be included (at least, not in this iteration). When you study for the PMP exam, you'll learn a lot about how to do change management on larger projects.
[ December 04, 2007: Message edited by: Andrew Stellman ]