Managing Successful Programmes

I’ve just heard from Pearce Mayfield that I have passed the Managing Successful Programmes practitioner qualification -although the result isn’t on the APMG/OGC site yet.

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.

Unfortunately the course I was attending has been withdrawn for June by the provider.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.

The pre-work for the course consists of

• A copy of the Managing Successful Programmes book (wiki page)
  
• Two documents that form part of the “Telekom BV” case study
• A pre-course workbook