Putting Time Aside for Revision

Whichever way you’ve chosen to learn PRINCE2, whether by self-study, distance-learning course or through a face-to-face training course, make sure you put sufficient time aside for it. Putting time aside means time for revision as well as for the actual learning itself.

Keeping your evenings free during a course

If you’re attending a course held within reach of your home – perhaps held on site within your own organisation – then cancel your evening commitments for the duration of the course. A full course covering the method and both exams typically takes five full days.

Before people attend one of my PRINCE2 courses, I always ensure that I point out very clearly that they need to keep the evenings free for revision. Before running a course for a particular local authority, I gave the usual warning in good time. When I arrived to start the training, I reinforced the importance of revising each evening. The response from almost all attendees was that they couldn’t possibly do that. One person had a cookery class one evening a week, badminton club on another and other regular appointments on other nights and couldn’t miss them. I was rather alarmed and pointed out the intensity of the PRINCE2 course. She remained adamant that she couldn’t cancel anything – and she didn’t. Another person kept quiet but came up to me on the second morning, after he was unable to answer basic questions in the morning review, to explain that he worked in a bar each evening. He assured me that he had read some of the manual, though, because he had the book under the counter and managed to look at a few pages before the bar got busy. I reported the problem immediately to managers within the organisation, but they weren’t interested and said that their staff would do their best. The exam results for that group were, predictably, disastrous. By the way, I’m not criticising local authorities in general. Another course that I taught at around the same time had staff who were incredibly dedicated and professional. It was a large course and everyone took both the Foundation and Practitioner exams as part of the week-long event. We had a 100 per cent pass rate in both exams.

Keeping your days free during a course

The heading of this section may sound a little strange, and if it’s caught your attention because of that, good. If you’re attending a course, then your days are free to learn ­PRINCE2 . . . aren’t they? You may realise that I’m talking about the influence of your mobile phone. You really need to concentrate on learning, and you can’t do that if you keep nipping out to take a call or you’re busy texting a colleague about some key work issue (I trust that you’re not merely tweeting to your friends) while your course tutor is explaining some essential part of the method.

Try to clear the decks before you go on the course, so that you won’t be interrupted with matters that you could have dealt with beforehand. You should also explain to colleagues – and managers – that you’re going on a course that will be taking all of your attention. Ask them not to contact you unless it really is essential.

On training courses, I always ask people to keep their phones switched right off unless they are expecting a really urgent call. I said this at the start of one event, as usual, but one guy kept his phone on and had a stream of incoming calls each day. He had his phone on silent but kept grabbing it and going out of the door to take a call. He was frequently gone for ten minutes, and sometimes more. On the first morning, I warned him that he was missing essential material and that the phone calls were a real problem. The phone calls were still happening in the afternoon, so I talked to him about it again. It turned out that he was trying to run a project while attending the course, and hadn’t delegated any of the work to others. It was a critical time in the project, and he needed to be in control. I advised him to leave the course and come back on a later one when he had more time available, but he insisted on staying and said he could manage. I tried again a day later, with the same response. He’d booked for Foundation and Practitioner exams as part of the event, but didn’t get as far as the Practitioner exam because he failed the Foundation – and he failed it spectacularly.

Using an email auto-responder

Try to cut down on the volume of emails you’re likely to receive by explaining to people that you’re going to be away for a few days. Set up an auto-responder message to say that a delay will occur before you answer an email – or better still that you’re out of the office for the week – and give the details of a colleague who can be contacted if someone needs to take action.

You may think that emails are less of a problem because you can deal with them at the end of the day. However, remember the advice in the previous section about keeping your evenings free for revision. It’s not good to have an intensive day of training followed by an hour and a half answering emails, because you’ll start your revision late in the evening when you’re really tired.

Attending a course that’s on site

If your PRINCE2 course is being held as an organisational event in or near your own building, then beware of the temptation to go back to your desk in the morning and afternoon breaks or at lunchtime to check on things. Two problems arise with trips back to the office:

You lose the focus on PRINCE2, because you get involved again in the hustle and bustle of your day-to-day job. You’re also likely to still be thinking about work issues as you start the next course session and not be concentrating fully on the material, which may be important.

You’re bound to be spotted, and one or two people will find something vitally urgent they need to discuss with you. Almost always that will make you late returning to the training room and you’ll have missed important content in the course. In turn, that can lead to misunderstandings and difficulty in taking on board subsequent ­information.

The answer is to try your hardest to be ‘away’ during the course. If you or your colleagues think that’s impractical, consider what happens when you go on holiday or you’re off sick with some nasty bug. You can’t nip back to your desk three or four times a day then.

You may be tempted to think, ‘Oh I know it can be a problem, but I can handle it,’ but please take the warning seriously. It can undermine your learning with consequent impact on your PRINCE2 projects as well as your chances of success in the exams.

Including revision in distance learning

If you’re learning PRINCE2 with a distance-learning package, remember to set aside time for personal revision before your exams, not just time to work through the package. The package should include questions and reinforcement material, but that material is based on what the author thinks you’ll need to know. With personal revision, you can spotlight the things that you’re finding awkward or difficult to understand. Remember also that you need to learn the method, not merely work through the training material.

Different people have different learning styles, and your personal revision can be in a style that you know works effectively for you. For example, those with an auditory learning style lock on to words and like the course tutor to explain things with examples and analogies. Is that you? If so, you may well have found that the best way of locking information into your memory during revision is to pace up and down and repeat things out loud.

Calculating the revision time you need

People often ask how much time is needed for revision, and that question is probably in your mind too. It’s a difficult question to answer because the answer depends on a range of factors. Some people learn faster than others, particularly if they’ve recently done other learning such as a college or university course. Familiarity with the content of the method is also a factor. If the whole of the method is entirely new to you, it can take up to an hour to revise each subject area, such as a theme or process, and some people need a bit more even than this on some parts of the method. If you’ve some project experience, then you may find you can learn PRINCE2 in much less time. Perhaps the approach to projects that you’ve already used is different to PRINCE2, but nevertheless some of the underlying concepts will be the same; perhaps it’s just the terminology that’s different. If that’s the case for you, you’ll be able to get to grips with the detail of the method much more rapidly.

When planning your time, don’t forget that it’s important to practise with exam questions as part of your revision, so schedule in some time for that too. See what I mean about putting enough time aside for learning the method?