Appendix A
If reading MSP For Dummies gives you the programme management bug (no nasty spots, I promise), you may want to take some of the MSP exams. Here I provide the basic structure of the MSP exam system as well as a few tips on the purpose of the exams and how to tackle them.
You can take three MSP examinations:
When you sit the Foundation exam, it's marked immediately. So you can sit the Foundation exam, take a break for an hour or so, and then sit the Practitioner exam.
The Practitioner exam may also be marked immediately, or you may have to wait a few weeks. You can sit the Practitioner exam and then immediately afterwards sit the Advanced Practitioner exam. But if later marking reveals that you failed your Practitioner, your Advanced Practitioner exam is put in abeyance until you pass the Practitioner exam at another attempt.
An increasingly diverse range of options exist for sitting the exams. Any list I give here would probably be out of date before you read this book. Suffice it to say that you can sit the exams as part of face-to-face training, as part of e-learning, at an open centre or by arrangement with an accredited training organization such as AFA, run by yours truly (www.AFAprojects.com).
The purpose of this qualification is to confirm that you have sufficient knowledge and understanding of the MSP guidance in order to carry out various roles in a programme. For example, you may want to interact with those involved in the management of a programme or act as an informed member of the team working within an MSP environment ‒ perhaps in a Programme Office, a business change team or project delivery team.
In other words, the Foundation exam tests that you know the MSP vocabulary. If you attend a course, you receive instruction in this aspect so that you can understand the jargon sufficiently to speak fluent MSP. After you read this book thoroughly, you should be able to speak MSP well enough to pass the Foundation examination; a course may be unnecessary.
Here are some key points about the Foundation examination:
The questions are pretty straightforward. A typical question may be:
(I hope you chose the Senior Responsible Owner!)
The questions test knowledge, or basic understanding, at quite a detailed level. If you have a grasp of the big picture of MSP, you can often deduce the answers. But quite often you can practise for the exam by just remembering some detailed MSP facts.
I think the Foundation exam is pretty straightforward, and most people do pass it, if they concentrate for a little while. Pass rates are extremely high, which means that it doesn't really reveal the level of your understanding of programme management; it just shows that you have an interest.
The Practitioner exam is for people who are going to take a more substantial role within a programme. As well as being able to speak the language (which the Foundation exam tests; see the preceding section), such people need to understand how the different parts of programme management fit together.
The Practitioner exam:
A typical Practitioner exam question may ask you to match characters described in a scenario to possible roles, or perhaps tie up pieces of information about a scenario to individual sections in a document.
Most people find the Practitioner exam pretty hard work. It's over two hours of focused cross-referencing between a scenario and different parts of the MSP manual. If you have the sort of mind that can concentrate and assimilate a fair amount of information, you should be able to get through, even without experience of programme management. But some people do find the exam a bit of a hurdle.
About two thirds of people who sit the Practitioner pass it first time, so in the real world it shows that you've got your mind round the theory of MSP. But it doesn't necessarily indicate any experience.
The Advanced Practitioner exam is how you demonstrate that you've been working in programmes and you have opinions about how programme management works (or should work).
The Advanced Practitioner examination:
Alternatively you can write an essay of about 2,000 words, about a programme you've worked on.
The Advanced Practitioner is an extremely useful qualification. If I were recruiting people to take important roles within a programme, this qualification would indicate to me that someone had experience and had taken some time to pass an examination that demonstrated that experience.
Interestingly, the markers of the Advanced Practitioner don't have a set of answers they're looking for. If you can make a persuasive argument for why, say, quality should be managed by Business Change Managers and not Programme Managers, they read and consider your reasoning. You score marks if your reasoning:
You may be the sort of person who's sufficiently well organized that you can take an Advanced Practitioner exam, or write the paper, without any guidance. But I think that's unlikely. Most of the people I've coached through the Advanced Practitioner find that they need some help with their writing technique. Very few people write naturally with the level of precision you need for an Advanced Practitioner, against the clock.
For some reason, virtually no one sits the Advanced Practitioner exam; it's not very popular (though trainers and consultants have to sit it). Therefore very few people have the qualification and it's not widely known. That's a real pity. I encourage people to do the Advanced Practitioner exam.
Here are my top tips for succeeding at the Advanced Practitioner exam:
Theoretically you can sit all three exams on one training course, but in practice doing so is extremely difficult and very few training companies offer this option.
A much more realistic approach is to sit the Foundation and Practitioner on a course and then arrange to do your Advanced Practitioner a little later. You can do this exam on a course or with a little remote coaching. Be clear what you want when you select a training provider:
But again a word of caution: some training companies offer what's in effect an exam cram. If that's what you want, you'll find it's competitively priced.
As with so much in life, caveat emptor (buyer beware): you get what you pay for.
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