The Shocking Secret PMP Doesn’t Teach You

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]This is the biggest PMP myth that you are never expected to solve. The PMP teaches you how projects succeed, but how does that actually translate to the real world? Hey friends, my name's Alvin. I'm a certified PMP project manager and this is a very controversial topic that I wanted to dive into today.

[00:00:22]And I'm excited for this because there were quite a few PMP myths that I had to unlearn the hard way based on my own real experiences. Now, I'm sharing my own point of view and my personal experiences from my 10-plus years in engineering and project management. This is just my opinion and it doesn't mean necessarily that it's the right one. And so, I love to hear from you. Have you been able to apply everything that you learned from your PMP into the real world with managing your projects? Let me know what you think and drop me your comment in the comments section. So, the myth here is that the PMP teaches you how projects actually succeed. And I personally think that this is a myth and I want to explain to you why. You see, when I was studying for my PMP exam, I was learning about many of the best practices with how to manage projects and lead a teams. But over time, I started seeing that this is going to follow a specific patterns like what should the project manager do first?

[00:01:24]What is the best action to take as a project manager? Or what should the project manager do next? And so, as you're studying for your PMP exam, you get trained to answer this pattern of questions. You learn quite a few things which I wrote down in my notes. You learn the mindset of how to be a servant leader. You learn the processes that make up each domain in project management. You learn the step-by-step framework where inputs go into a process which then create an output. And And course, this has been refined over the past few years where the PMI, the Project Management Institute, has revised the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition to the 7th and now the 8th Edition to effectively update the ITTOs. And of course, you learn about project artifacts, documentation, and how that ties into the project success. And of course, you learn the very rigorous process on stakeholder management and risk management. However, are these standardized best practices actually translatable into the real world where there's this hidden dynamic of company power, influence, and relationship dynamics that you don't obviously see when you're studying for the PMP exam. So, these are the few reasons why I believe that some of the information that we learn from the PMP may not translate to the real world. The first reason is that the PMP teaches you that projects are a system which will create an outcome. Now, please don't get me wrong here. The PMP is extremely valuable to us. We learn the fundamentals and we learn how to have the mindset of an ideal project manager when we're placed into an ideal scenario, right? However, projects have differing scenarios and different environments, right? Projects in the real world are all about the social environment and the context of the entire organization. You see, there's actually politics at play. Who is the most influential? Who is the most powerful? Who you can build alliances with to move your initiative forward, right? There's all these hidden dynamics at play and it's not as simple as what should a project manager do next or what is the best action to take. And that's just something that I've learned over time. And don't get me wrong, the PMP definitely teaches you so many things that are important, but I do think that to go a step deeper, you need to also understand how there's this complex web of human interactions, this level of politics, relationship building, influence, and persuasion that collectively needs to be built to be a successful project manager and a leader regardless of what organization that you work for. And so, while the PMP does emphasize many of the concepts from the PMBOK Guide, just keep in mind that a lot of the principles will not be applicable for very small companies like startups. And that's just because of the scale, the size and the magnitude of the company itself. It may not have the same level of revenue to invest into all of these resources or the size of the teams to invest all their time into building up these processes. And what I like about how things have evolved over the past few years is that the PMBOK Guide has changed to incorporate more aspects with regards to tailoring. And so, with the PMBOK 7th Edition and the 8th Edition, now there's more sections about it's so important to tailor your project to fit the needs of your organization.

[00:04:51]And as I mentioned earlier, things are driven by people, right? We're not robots. You don't just tell somebody to do something and then it gets done by Friday. It doesn't really happen that way. Sometimes you have to influence them through persuasion or you have to speak to another person who might be able to influence that specific colleague to get some work done. And that's kind of like the dynamics that I'm referring to. You see, people are the ones who make decisions. And so, decisions can be influenced by emotions and feelings. And it's not necessarily this black or white spectrum. It's kind of like in the middle where it's like you have to lean into the human side of things and learn how to evaluate what's the play going on and how are other people feeling about this, right? And it's this this soft approach that I think that we need to develop as we dive deeper into this new era with AI. And something that a lot of people don't talk about is that people like us, myself included, colleagues that we work with, our senior leadership, everyone is this influenced to do something because of certain incentives. And the most obvious incentive is that sometimes their performance might be tied to a financial incentive, like a bonus, a promotion, or earning a higher salary towards the end of next year if an initiative is delivered ahead of schedule, right? But those are just the most obvious ones, but there's other hidden incentives that you may not be aware of. And the other thing that you learn over time as you start to gain more experience in your career is that people will have influence over you. And as a PM, you don't necessarily have formal authority. In fact, you have informal authority, and you have to learn to build it up by being someone who's positive, who has engagement with people around you, and you know how to build the dynamics with senior leadership. And so, you have to learn how to build your own reputation and your line of credit, so to speak, and build alliances with your colleagues, your team members, and senior leadership if you want to get things done and move your projects and key initiatives in the right direction. And for me, this wasn't taught by the PMP, at least from when I studied for it. But I again, I would love to hear what you think. Were you taught these things? And if you weren't, how did you go about learning these skills? I would absolutely love to hear from you. So again, the biggest takeaway from this principle is that while the PMP does emphasize learning processes and the most fundamental aspects in project management, like schedule management, risk management, or stakeholder management, it's not always a one-to-one fit with every company. You have to tailor your project to the company, and you have to recognize that there are hidden dynamics at play with every single interaction. There are so much more nuances that we may not be aware of that are behind this door that we're dealing with and a lot of times organizational politics might be at play here. And so, the only thing that we can do is build trust with people, learn to network, and start to build alliances with other people strategically so that we can get things done. Now, reason number two why the PMP may not translate to the real world is because it teaches us to create robust project documentation, which does not necessarily guarantee success when you're managing projects. Now, this is a harsh reality, right? In today's age, we have AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude who can quickly create a project charter, a business case, or templates for us that we can generate in a matter of seconds. And all we have to do is tweak and optimize it to fit exactly what we're looking for. And so, as we start to dive deeper into this modern era with AI, we also have to adapt in our roles. Our role should be to drive conversations so that we can make decisions faster and deliver value even quicker. And so, while we do learn about these different kinds of project artifacts from the PMBOK Guide and for studying for the PMP exam, we need to also understand that just because you have a project artifact does not 100% guarantee that your project will be successful. What I don't want you to do is to spend hours of your time just sitting in a silo using ChatGPT or an AI tool to create the project document.

[00:09:06]Instead, what I think we should be doing is brainstorming and collaborating with our team live to create these documents.

[00:09:14]And here's my personal recommendation.

[00:09:16]Don't do things in a silo, but involve the team and the team members who will be doing the work. Of course, this is what is endorsed by the PMP exam and what we're taught. So, this isn't anything new here. And what I also recommend is to treat your project documents like it's like a snapshot in time where it's this is what we did and this is what we agreed upon for this month. Things will change, but we need to continuously review it and adapt our plan as we keep moving forward. So, from my point of view and my personal perspective, I don't think that we should be spending hours of our time creating a robust project plan and a very detailed project timeline like we used to do several decades ago. Instead, I think that times have evolved where we have to partner with AI tools to be faster at creating these documents, but not to 100% rely on them and instead to build connections with people and to build them collaboratively in live sessions. And we want to use that time to get conversations with the people so that we can get their buy-in and their engagement and then we can use that document as a sign of evidence that we're moving forward in the right direction. And of course, we can always look back to see what we agreed upon in the last month or the last few months, but it is a sign that we're moving forward in the right direction. With that said, here are the biggest lessons that I've learned after taking the PMP exam and how I'm applying it to the real world in project management. Number one is what I didn't realize back then is that some of what PMP teaches us may not actually hold up because of the human interactions and because there's this behind-the-scenes interaction with regards to company realities, the shifting dynamics with influence and persuasion and communication and relationship building. The second big lesson that I learned that I'm applying to today is that the PMP does not teach you how to be a more effective communicator. You have to learn how to do that separately. And so, you have to learn how to build authority and still manage expectations without being too aggressive. The third lesson that I learned after taking the PMP exam, which I'm applying to today, is optimizing to making sure that we deliver real value, right? We're hired to do a job and to deliver the ROI to the company. It could be tied to driving more revenue, improving the operational efficiencies of a manufacturing process, or driving more customers to the business. Whatever it is, you have to deliver real value to the organization in the specific job that you were hired for. And the second thing that we should also be doing is focus on building trust and relationships with everyone around you.

[00:11:59]Everyone around us is in different situations, but we should still do our very best to be humble, to drive conversations with empathy, and still be humble in anything and everything that we do. And lastly, we should do everything in our power to use data and the tools available to us to make decisions faster. Now, I hope that you've gained value out of these lessons. Again, this is just my point of view and my opinion. It doesn't mean it's the right one, and so I would love to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway from this video, and how have you applied what you've learned from your PMP into your day job with managing projects? Drop me your comment down below, and I look forward to hearing from you. Now, to learn how to succeed as a project manager, you need to watch this video next, and I will see you in the next video.

[00:12:53]>> [music] [music]