Managing Successful Programmes

The new version of MSP has been launched, amongst the authors are my ex-colleague Rod Sowden, and Patrick Mayfield, who I haven’t met, but whose training company seem to do good work!

Now to get on a refresh course…

(cross-posted to main blog)

I spent last week on the MSP course.

The trainers were good, the group size was good (9 of us), and the other delegates were an interesting and friendly bunch from a range of industries. Between us we covered print, broadcast and online media, telecomms, manufacturing, software, and a couple of flavours of consultancy.

I’d recommend this course to anyone who was interested in MSP - the training is well-adapted for adult learning, and has a clear emphasis on providing the skills to get through the exams. It is however an intensive week - in particular on the first three evenings there was two to three hours of homework each night. The homework is framed as “optional”, but as a large part of it is practice in answering exam questions, I would imagine that it would be hard to get through the exams without doing the homework.
I managed to pass the Foundation exam without much difficulty, but I won’t know the result of the Intermediate and Practitioner papers for about 8 weeks – apparently the APMG examiners are over-worked at present!

The material is still very “close to me” in my mind, so too early to reflect properly on what I have learned.

I’ve signed up for a multi-media PRINCE2 Practioner course from Key Skills ILX
The course consists of a CD ROM, exercises, access to a tutor and a 2 day face-to-face revision course during which you take the exam.

More later…

Unfortunately the course I was attending has been withdrawn for June by the provider. Looks like I shall now go in October. Inevitably my motivation to go through the pre-work has been somewhat reduced, however I shall continue to post here - I’m finding lots of ways to introduce key elements of the MSP approach into day-to-day work.

Later this year (June) I’m attending a training course on Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), leading (hopefully) to the practitioner certificatation. MSP is the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) approach to ensuring the success of major change programmes.

I’ve set up this site as an online learning diary, and a central place for various notes. To support the blog there is also a wiki for more long-form notes.