I bought Rita Mulcahy's 5th edition PMP Exam Prep book on the advice of a PMP-certified PM who had used her earlier book to pass the previous version of the exam. She spoke highly of Rita. I have no idea why.
Not only did I buy this book, but I also took and completed her online course in order to obtain the 35 credit hours required to sit for the exam. Don't waste your money on the online course. It's nothing but a rehash of the book, word for word, with little "next" and "previous" arrows instead of pages. But just so we're clear, these comments are about the book itself, not the online material. (Reviewing the online "course" would include an entire litany of different complaints!)
How do I hate this book? Let me count the ways. First, the presentation and organization of the material is disorganized and overly complicated. The book includes a LOT of detail, so much that it's hard to discern what's useful and what's extraneous. Yet, in spite of this I still had exam questions (such as PTA calculations) that the Mulcahy book doesn't mention, let alone explain in depth. This book takes the "quantity over quality" approach to PMI material.
Most study aids conveniently arrange the material in a logical format by process groups, knowledge areas, inputs, tools and techniques and outputs. Rita's book doesn't and it's detrimental to learning the material. Instead of telling you what the PMBOK lists as inputs and helping you understand them so you don't have to just memorize them by rote, she instead includes a large number of worthless exercises to have you "guess" what you might need. The same goes for tools and techniques, and outputs. While that's a delightful "pie in the sky" approach to organic project management, I found it a complete waste of time as an exam studying approach. And this from a book that claims to be a "course in a book for passing the PMP exam" no less!
In much the same fashion, Mulcahy proudly touts her "Process Game", an exercise where you cut up a bunch of processes from paper and arrange them into process groups, correctly ordering in the Planning process group. Again Mulcahy overcomplicates and obfuscates the entire process in two ways: 1) Half of the processes in her "game" aren't the same names that the PMBOK uses and 2) She randomly throws in additional "subprocesses"! Here's the thing, if you simply buy a real study book, and you learn that all of the processes occur in the standard PMBOK order (Integration, Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, HR, Risk, Procurement) in each process group where they appear, the rest of it falls into place. I found that this "game" actually confused me more, and made it tougher for me to learn. Once I trashed the pieces and stopped trying to learn it the overly-complicated "Rita way" everything came together for me.
More disturbing than the overwhelming volume of material, some of which I found totally irrelevant and all of which was terribly organized, I found the condescending, snarky, downright rude tone of the book insulting. I've been a professional project manager for many years and I think that the approach that RMC Project Management takes in this book of belittling the student is completely unprofessional. It distracts from the material and served no purpose. I don't understand why a business would insult its customers as routinely as RMC Project Management does in this book.
I studied for the PMP for several months, on the side. I didn't have a chance to take a week off to prepare solidly. About three months into using the Rita Mulcahy book and online system, I was so frustrated that I went out and started looking for other books instead. I found "The PMP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try" by Andy Crowe of Velociteach and started reading that. VERY quickly I realized that Crowe's book presented the material well, logically, and without all of the extraneous fluff and insults that characterized the RMC book.
Using Crowe's book, I finally was able to pull all of the elements together that I needed for the exam. If I felt I didn't understand an area or feel 100% comfortable with it after reading Crowe's book, I went to the RMC book and researched it further. I found that after reading Crowe's book, I was able to pass the Rita Mulachy book's quizzes with 85%-90% scores. Something I wasn't able to do when I was reading the Rita Mulcahy book!
The ONLY thing that this book does better than the Crowe book is that the Rita questions are confusing, annoying, frustrating and frequently seem contradictory. This makes them very much like the PMP Exam! The questions from this book are tougher and prepare you better for the exam than the Crowe book. It's a shame the trademark snarky Rita Mulcahy tone comes out in so many of the answers. Snide remarks like "Did you forget that...." in lieu of real explanations appear far too frequently in the answers section of this book. I still don't get the point Mulcahy is trying to make while she unprofessionally insults the readers of her book.
In short, I only recommend this book for the exam questions, and even then, only halfheartedly. I passed the exam solidly on my first try just a few days ago, but credit for that rests solely on Andy Crowe's material. I don't think I would have been able to say that if I had just used "PMP Exam Prep" by Rita Mulcahy.
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