The PgMP experience

When I received my PgMP credential last year, I was the 13th (or 14th?) in India to do so.


Little did I realise what it would take to achieve the credential when I started my journey around October of 2008. I was browsing through PMI's website when the credential piqued my interest. I immediately downloaded the information booklet and started going through the eligibility criteria. After convincing myself that I meet their criteria, I started working on my application.

The application was a project in itself. It took me more than three months to organise my thoughts and write down all the information required to fill in the form. I must admit that the $1500 price tag did put me off in the beginning. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it. The online application is not too difficult particularly if you have gone through it as part of your PMP or other certification applications with PMI.

In two-three days I received an email from PMI that my application has been selected for an audit. I then learnt that almost all applications are audited. (considering that PMI wants to ensure the sanctity of the credential, that it wouldn’t compromise). I had to furnish photocopies of my educational certificates and a declaration from my reporting manager that the information that I have stated in my application is authentic. It took another three weeks before these documents reached PMI's office.

Another week and I get an email from PMI giving me the green signal. I had started preparing for the exam in the meantime. The SPM was my only source of preparation for the first two weeks by which time Crosswind shipped the Boot camp book and the CD that I had ordered. It was indeed a costly affair!


The examination is very rigorous and tests your patience along with your knowledge. The questions sometimes are so lengthy that they run into pages.


Then came the Multi rater Assessment. PMI sent a questionnaire to selected respondents by email. They were given close to three weeks to respond. Thankfully for me, all of them promptly responded.

I am happy to help aspirants. Please get in touch if you think I can be of help. It’s bharath@kbharath.com

Fuel price hike. Once again

The Prime Minister appointed "expert panel" has come up with a recommendation of a steep fuel price hike. While India is already battling a ridiculously high inflation, I wonder how how an expert panel can come up with such a recommendation. I doubt if they have taken a holistic view considering the overal economic impact before they made such a recommendation.

We haven't had any reactions yet from either the Prime Minister or any of the State Governments. I am sure there will be some heated outbursts very soon.

At the one hand elections are still being fought (after more than 5 decades of independence) on fundamental needs, Governments on the other, don't hesitate to give away Television Sets as freebies to people under the poverty line. When they can't even afford to buy cooking gas, what would they do with a television set ? Can't they cut down all these and subsidise fuel at least for the poor people?

Why should someone driving a Merc get subsidised Diesel? Can't Diesel subsidies be given only to the poor?

There are many more questions, but apparently no answers.

WM 6.5 on Touch Diamond 2

After months of waiting, HTC finally released WM 6.5 for my Touch Diamond 2 yesterday !

Ford Figo !

I was driving to work this morning when I noticed a strange looking car. On closer examination, it was a Ford Figo being test driven. Here's what I managed to capture on my phone. Sad, I couldn't get it at all angles.

ICICI charges for NEFT transactions

The National Electronic Funds Transfer scheme was launched by the Reserve Bank of India earlier this year to facilitate online inter-bank fund transfers across India. The aim of this I believe is to reduce the volume of cheque transactions which could save time and money to banks as the new system is fully automated unlike cheques that are processed manually.

While banks incur a cost when cheques are processed (because manual labour is involved), there are no charges when it comes to electronic transfers because computers do the work. I am surprised why banks including ICICI don't charge for cheque transactions but charge customers for using the NEFT service. If at all there are inter-bank charges that they pass on to the customers, it is high time they talk among themselves to do away with such charges so that everyone stand benefitted.

MS Office 2007 add-in to save files as PDFs

Wow ! I just discovered that you can save a document as a PDF from within MS Office 2007. This is really cool; gone are days when you had to buy software to do just this. Not sure why Microsoft has not bothered to publicize this Add-in. I am sure most of us would need to do this very often.

Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en

Enjoy!

ICICIDirect goes down

ICICIDirect.com purportedly India's largest stock trading portal went down during trading hours today. If this had happened in any other country, I could have sued the service provider.