My road to BOP4 certification

I have been a satisfied Cordys consultant for some time. This may be no surprise for the ones having read my BLOGs the past few months. Though I am still looking at “other fish in the sea” I felt I was ready for a new step in my relationship with Cordys BOP4 and I wanted to take things to the next level: Certification!

As I was confident about my knowledge and experience I decided to subscribe for certification, even before knowing the exact procedure. Remembering earlier certifications like RUP, PMBok, Prince2, ITIL and Java, I was expecting an on-site computer based theory exam. So I blocked a day to travel to Cordys in the beautiful surroundings of Putten. At the meantime I chose a nice piece of wall in my office to proudly present my future Cordys certificate!

I read the Cordys certification site and spoke to two primer Cordys employees who had taken the exam as well. How (happily) surprised I was to found out the complete exam could be taken from my own office! (Good news in an overcrowded country like the Netherlands, where distances are short, but travel times sometimes long!).

I was less thrilled to find out it wasn’t just a theoretical exam I had to take, like the ones of several other BPM vendors. It would not as simple as that! Apart from an 80 question theory exam, I would be exposed to a practical exam and an web cam interview before a commission!

It was getting clear to me that Cordys does not hand out a certification to just anyone who is able to spell out “BOP4”.

I felt obliged to do a little more of preparation than initially planned, which was a bit of a pain in these busy times. On the other hand: The value of the future certificate would be a lot higher because this higher threshold!

I ordered the certification exam via https://certification.cordys.com, and selected the date I already blocked.

The learning path for the theory requirements showed – though I already had considerable hands on experience with BOP4 - there were still a lot of details to know, as I (appearently) hadn’t touched every dark corner of BOP4 during the projects.

The good thing was that the windy road through the BOP4 documentation provided me with a number new insights. Cool! I was even increasing my knowledge, instead of just proofing it.

Then the moment was there!

On the date the exam was scheduled I could pick my own time to take the theory exam, within the timeframe of 24 hours. I just needed to visit the certification dashboard and press the “take exam” button.

The game was on!

In 60 minutes 80 various multiple-choice questions were fired at me, of which at least 75 percent had to be answered correctly. The exam tool allowed to mark questions to review them later (provided there is still time left!). 80 questions in an hour is a fair amount, but it is easy to spend too much time in rethinking the alternatives. I needed my time so I just had about 10 minutes left to reconsider the questions I was not sure about. I did not have to use the “end exam” button: After 60 minutes the exam ended automatically.

The certification site then asked me politely for some patience to determine the outcome… And… after a short while I was congratulated! I had passed the theoretical part of the exam! And – more important - the prerequisite to take the second, practical part.

The certification site presented me with 6 practical exercises to solve. All should be finished within a week.

I have the disposition of a local BOP4 environment, however I decided to use the VM-ware environment provided by Cordys: It provides the North-Wind demo, and likely some of the artifacts or database tables could be reused in the exam exercises.

The exercises concerned mainly (combined) UI, BPM and business rules tasks. Of some it took some time to interpret the exact purpose of each assignment, but in the end it was rather obvious what was expected. I decided to start right away, and managed to fulfill the questions in roughly an hour each, including interpretation and testing. Indeed I was able to reuse some NorthWind database tables and webservices, so that was a little advantage.

After reviewing the solutions again the next day I was sure enough to submit the results. This was just a matter of synchronizing the workspace and zipping and sending the synchronized folder to the certification commission.

After submitting the certification site stated that it would maximally take 3 weeks before I would hear whether I would be conducted to an interview.

It appeared to take only a couple of days before I received (and confirmed) an invitation. As required I purchased a webcam and prepared my google environment for the video conference.

The interview was conducted by the certification program manager and the product manager. Basically I had to explain each solution, and answer additional questions about them. My experience and knowledge proved to be sound: as I was capable of coming up with all the answers.

After more than an hour we finished discussing all exercises and the interview was over.

For a third time I was kindly requested to wait for a verdict.

Confident I waited the result. Only after a quarter of an hour I was informed by a colleague who learned via Cordys Twitter that I was certified! Not long after that I received a formal confirmation mail as well. It was official: I had entered the world of Certified Cordys consultants!

Though I had some expectations I felt pretty relieved after the three-stage-procedure that lasted over a week! What made me especially proud was the score of 98% in the practical part.

And now?

Now we’re even more ready for all those fine BPM projects that will use BOP4!

Best Regards and a fruitful 2011,

Harald van der Weel