Rick(PMLogics): PgMP – Do Not Underestimate the MRA

Do not underestimate getting the MRA survey completed for the final stage of the PgMP process. Unless all your raters are under the same roof, I found it difficult to verify who had completed the 74 question survey and who had not.

The major difficulties I experienced where: updating email addresses for rater’s that had changed since the original application was submitted to PMI, and trying to resend a single invitation when the original email was identified as spam and deleted; based on the ambiguity of subject title “PMI MRA Rater Invitation”.

In the first case you can only make changes after passing the exam to update email addresses, and for the second item there is an option to send a reminder to your 12+ references, which takes care of the deleted email, but sends everyone else another email. Thereafter you find yourself contacting all the references that had completed the survey let them know the reminder was not for them.

I strongly recommend keeping in touch with your raters and letting them know when they should receive an email for the survey. Typically, you will have a couple of days between passing the exam and the MRA to get things lined up. After that you are able to monitor the number of surveys completed by peer, manager and direct reports, but without knowing who. Again, I suggest you ask your esteemed raters to let you know as each completes the survey.

I also found that the vendor contact information for the company conducting the survey did not return or respond to my telephone or emails for help. Fortunately, PMI helped in these instances.

Finally, I would recommend that you consider including more than 12 references to increase your probability of actually receiving 12 responses. This lessons the less risk of not receiving the minimum number of responses to pass this final stage, which according to other posts may actually be less than 12, but who wants to take the chance!

With such a small community of prospective PgMP’s, I hope this account of my experience helps.

Best of luck.

Rick
p.s. I passed the MRA – all done!

Related posts:

1. roger Chou, PgMP:The Road to PgMP
2. Arindam: Phew! Passed PgMP (PgMP Lessons Learned)
3. Xavier: Passed PgMP exam 3-March-09… Thank God!!