The Crazy PMPprep – A Novel

Let me say this right away: I don’t really know anything about project management – what I do know is just enough for the usual small projects of my professional and private everyday life. And I don’t need to know much more about it.

My motivation for reading “The Crazy PMPprep” (A novel to prepare for PMP and CAPM certification) was therefore not to further qualify myself in the field of project management (or even to get certified), but simply curiosity. I witnessed various discussions between the authors during the writing process and wanted to know what exactly it was all about.  So I asked the authors, my Harlequin colleagues BCO and RGE, for the manuscript and after only 30 pages fell for the charm of the tragic hero Henri, music therapist in a psychiatric institution.

Henri is inexperienced in project management (to call him naïve is perhaps going a little too far) and is coerced into organising a concert with patients. And what keeps interfering with his plans is life in all its comic and tragic variations. The authors really leave nothing out: power games, intrigues, tragic love stories, jealousy, drugs, traumas, etc. If the book were a film, I would certainly have held a pillow in front of my face at some moments to give myself a break from the recurring question, “What could possibly go wrong now? We’ve already had everything!”

Speaking of films: Since deep down I have a casting director slumbering inside me and almost every book I read immediately gives me an idea of who would have to play a particular role in the film, I immediately saw Jürgen Vogel (Henri) and Jan-Josef Liefers (Peter Pomosch) in Henri’s office in the psychiatric clinic fighting out their war of words.

The female sex is represented in the novel by Susi, Anita and Vanessa-Estelle – and even these names show that the authors have really left nothing to chance. Their joy in juggling with clichés is clearly evident in the book.

At the big show-down, the concert at the end of the novel, it takes all of your concentration to keep track of all the parallel paths to catastrophe and not to take the growing despair of the late-appointed third hero (Gross-Macke) too much to heart. In this way, readers can also practise keeping a critical distance from the events at the same time.

Whether this novel helps you survive PMP and CAPM certification is something I cannot really judge, but I assume so because of the diversity of the integrated training material. But it is certainly entertaining!

Original text: BBR
English translation: BCO