MSP Course Helps Spearhead New Direction

Gill’s MSP course helped her spearhead a new direction for her financial services firm

Gill has been a programme manager in the financial services industry just over a year. Before that she was a project manager with a rival company in the same sector. She became concerned about what she perceived as confusion in her company about the definition of programmes.

"I felt that too much time was taken up discussing whether something was a project or a programme, and therefore whether someone was a project manager or a programme manager. It may sound daft but actually people tended to get quite upset about this. I felt that underlying this problem was a deeper cause – that we had never really differentiated between projects and programmes, and that this was affecting our ability to deliver major initiatives. We were great at delivering the stand-alone projects."

Gill decided to attend a Managing Successful Programmes workshop to see if it would help to address this problem.

"Immediately I realised that this subject took projects to a very different level. We had a good debate about programmes versus projects, and I was amazed to find that my company had actually got it wrong; we were describing any project above a certain size as a ‘programme’, whereas actually a programme describes more of a strategic initiative with (possibly) a loosely-defined outcome. This means that the programme management role is quite different from that of a project manager, yet my company had just been promoting the senior project managers to be programme managers without any training.

"There turned out to be many key areas that my company had been missing, notably Benefits Management, which we tended to ignore unless the programme was a big success, and associated with that, the role of Business Change Manager, of which we had none! Putting a proper Programme Closure process into place will reap enormous benefits for us. Apart from these major areas, I also gained some useful tips from the other programme managers on the course, particularly around the politics of these things."

Gill sat the MSP Foundation and Practitioner exams as part of the week-long workshop.

"Getting accredited gave me a lot of credibility within my peers. So I came back to the office and really shook things up. We now define our programmes and projects correctly, using a set of guidelines from the course materials. We have a proper Programme Board, with clear roles and responsibilities from the MSP manual so there is no doubt or confusion. Everyone feels more comfortable that we now know what we’re doing and have better benefits measurement in place to learn lessons and celebrate our success."

All of the company’s programme managers have now undertaken MSP Practitioner. Gill is now a registered MSP Advanced Practitioner.