I passed the Senior Information System Project Manager exam, part of the Soft Exam, after about four months of preparation. I didn't sign up for any training course. The materials came from free online sources: videos, books, and apps. Apart from printing paper, I spent nothing.
What I used
The resources were enough. Adding more would have wasted time.
Books
- The official third edition of the Information System Project Manager textbook
- 32 Hours to Pass the Information System Project Manager Exam
- 5 Days of Cultivation for the Information System Project Manager Exam
Videos
- Xifang's video course on Bilibili
- Ma Jun's 2020 video course stored on Aliyun Drive
Materials
- Ma Jun's problem book and essay collection
The official textbook and the problem book are large enough to keep anyone busy. I didn't go looking for extra resources.
The four passes
I started in early February and kept going until May 28, nearly four months. I studied almost every day. Most focused study happened at home: after work from 7 to 9 p.m., then one more hour of video after my child fell asleep, from 11 p.m. to midnight. I watched the videos at 1.5x speed. During the workday I squeezed in multiple-choice practice on the app.
First pass, about a month: I watched videos and read the book alongside them.
Second pass, about 20 days: By then I had forgotten most of the content, but I had a rough map of what was tested, what wasn't, and what mattered. I reread the book on my own.
Third pass, about a month: This was for questions. I did past exam questions only, no mock exams. During the day I used the app for the morning multiple-choice section. In the evening I worked on case questions. For cases, I started with calculation questions, then error correction, then memorization of the broader points.
Fourth pass, about a month: The final month went to the essay paper. The exam requires one essay from the ten management areas, so I prepared one essay for each area.
How I prepared the essays
I prepared the essays in a fairly practical way:
- The project background, transition, and ending are common across essays, so I prepared those once.
- For each management area, I collected a batch of essays, picked the parts that fit my project, and edited them into one essay.
- Many areas overlap. Planning a certain management area and controlling it show up in several domains, so material can be reused.
- I ended up with one essay for each of the ten management areas.
Selecting and editing the essays didn't take much time. Memorizing them did. I had to repeat them over and over.
That said, I cut one corner. Looking at past exams, stakeholder management had never been tested, and it is closely related to communications management. I assumed that if it appeared at all, it would be through communications management. The essay section also used to offer two choices, so even if stakeholder management came up, I thought I could pick the other one. I didn't memorize the stakeholder management essay.
Of course, the exam tested stakeholder management. And there was no two-choice format that year, only one prompt. For a moment I wondered whether the paper had been printed wrong. If I had memorized every essay instead of taking that shortcut, my essay score would probably have been better.
Exam day
May 28 was the exam. The study plan had been repetitive and not especially clever: limited materials, several passes through the same content, and real past questions. The one place where I tried to outguess the exam was the essay section, and that is exactly where the plan caught up with me.