New iPhone App Helps Project Managers Prepare for PMP Exam

Project managers seeking the PMP (Project Management Professional) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) need look no further than their iPhones for help preparing for the PMP exam.

For $19.99, they can download electronic flashcards to their iPhones from Apple’s iTunes App Store. The PM Flash Cards app, developed by PM Champion, a provider of online training for the PMP exam, features 1,700 flash cards designed to help project managers study concepts from the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).

The 1,700 flashcards are divided into 15 categories, including general project management, project management processes, acronyms, communications management, risk management and procurement management.

Each flashcard displays one question. Clicking on “See the answer” at the bottom of each flashcard brings users to a new page with the answer. Users click “yes” or “no” to indicate whether or not their answer was correct. The app then forwards them to the next question, or users can repeatedly review questions they answered incorrectly until they are confident they know the answer.

Sample questions include:

• What should the project manager consider as inputs for any process of a project?
• Why is it important to plan risk management processes in an organization?
• What is the definition of quality?

The questions were developed by OSP International, a provider of project management training that’s registered with the Project Management Institute. PM Champion adapted an electronic flashcard application for the iPhone that OSP International originally created for BlackBerry smartphones.

The flashcard app for iPhone extends the original BlackBerry app’s functionality, says Cornelius Fichtner, president of OSP International. The iPhone app tallies the number of questions a user answers correctly and incorrectly during each session (the BlackBerry app didn’t offer such a “scoring” feature), and users can check their “scores” at any time. A scorecard screen shows the total number of questions answered correctly and incorrectly, as well as the number of questions a PMP student answered correctly and incorrectly in each category.

The app requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later. It can be used on an iPod Touch and the iPad. And users don’t need a cellular or Wi-Fi connection to access the flashcards once they’ve downloaded the app, which takes up less than 4 MB of space.

The flashcard app is also a lot more portable than the tome that is the PMI’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide).

Meridith Levinson covers Careers, Project Management and Outsourcing for CIO.com. Follow Meridith on Twitter @meridith. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline. Email Meridith at mlevinson@cio.com.