In each issue, Cheetah News features an individual who shares his or her ideas, insight, and experience with Cheetah Learning's Methodology.

If you are a project manager and would like to be featured in a brief interview with Chief Cheetah Michelle LaBrosse on her EverydayPM blog, please click here to send us your contact information.

Look Up and Look Around
When you’re juggling a job, a home, a three-year-old and a pregnancy, there’s not a whole lot of time to spare to pursue your PMP^® certification. But Wendy Wilhelm, software program manager in Hillsboro, Ore., wanted to demonstrate her career commitment by becoming certified.

“I tried to study on my own, but work and life got in the way,” says Wendy. “I knew I needed some professional training, and friends strongly recommended the Cheetah Exam Prep^® for the PMP^® exam class.”

The class met Wendy’s expectations, not only in terms of learning the vocabulary and Project Management concepts, but helping her to understand the mentality she needed to have about the test and increasing her confidence before she ever walked into the exam.

“Expect that the four-day class will consume every waking hour,” says Wendy. “Relax, read The PMBOK^® Guide, and tell everyone at work you are not available. Eat well, sleep well, and study hard.”

Wendy passed the PMP exam on her first try and found a new confidence. “Earning my PMP certification encouraged me to look up, look around and try to improve the workplace around me.”

So she did. After deciding she could run a PMO – and building one – Wendy shared her project manager insights in a paper she wrote on building virtual teams in software project management -- Building a Virtual SW Project Management Office: What you can do when there is no support for a centralized PMO. Her paper was featured at the 2008 PMI Global Congress in Denver in October.

“I’m on to my next new job, which is slightly different but still exciting,” she explains. “I’m working with a software organization to ensure it has the appropriate processes/communications in place to deliver a software stack for a first-ever silicon project. And I’m also the software project manager for the second generation silicon, which is in the planning phase.