§0 s1 = PRINCE2®- Foundation & Practitioner Exams & More

§0 V1 (1 of 454)::PRINCE2®- Foundation & Practitioner Exams & More::

Hello, and a very warm welcome **.

• I’m Simon, I am your guide through these course materials on your journey to P2 success.
• For many years I have been a P2 project management practitioner and a project management trainer, who has been helping people to build prince2 competency and obtain certification since before this century!
• This course’s real focus is on your need beyond the exam. It could be one of two; a quick pass to add to years of real-world experience or the need for a ground-up introduction. Either way the exam focus is the immediate destination and the long term goal should be your career needs.
• I’m obliged to say that the exam focussed elements of these materials are “Based on the AXELOS PRINCE2® 2009 official manual and is reproduced under licence from AXELOS. All rights reserved”
• I’ve designed these materials to be flexible what ever your balance of targets. They are also suitable what ever mix of agile and waterfall exists in your working environment. They are even suitable if you currently see agile as something for ballerinas or cats and a waterfall as something to do with a river.
• This course is different from many with similar titles available elsewhere for several reasons; first difference is the design to meet varying needs around that exam goal, second is that it is entirely free when you book your exams with us.
• A third difference is our unique revision aids such as ‘syllabus-subject-on-a-sheet-summaries’ and step by step animated and fully explained process-on-a-page activity maps, a start point maybe for those with lots of existing knowledge aiming at a quick pass and able to manage a steeper learning curve, but maybe an end point for those starting from zero needing a comprehensive introduction to projects through a gentle start to the learning curve.
  • There are ways these materials appear the same as other peoples; for example we include all the official practice exams that are only available from accredited organisation’s like mine, but here too we have an edge to offer you.
• Once upon a time I was a P2 examiner not these days because the exam is no longer essay based, now both F & P exams are multiple choice and marked by computers.
• Still my experience as an examiner, gives me insights about how questions are constructed from the syllabus which means I can share techniques to help you decode them so your preparation leads to an exam pass at your first attempt.
• To do that you’ll need to read these notes or listen to my narrations of them plus some focussed hard work ►studying the slide’s, ►studying the Revision Aids and ►answering the Practice exam questions that we provide in the course materials,. Together they will help you sail through the exams.
  • You can be confident this course is accurate and complete because we are an Accredited Training Organisation (ATO) so it has been certified by Axelos’ examining institute.
• You can be confident that my experience as an examiner means I know how to best approach the exam while long experience as a contract project manager means I’ve seen many different organisations which helps me anticipate what you need to know for your capable use after you are qualified.
• If your aim is real-world skills, perhaps for a career switch then be comforted that this course covers all the foundation stones for leading better and delivering smarter in your future projects after you are qualified.
  • The P2 syllabus doesn’t cover everything you need but these materials do, to a degree and our other non-exam courses are comprehensive.

Because of mixed needs and coverage beyond the syllabus I will be careful to differentiate between what is for the exam and what is adding capabilities to build on after you are qualified. Those on the quick path with existing skill can safely skip these parts for speed.

• As we go I’ll sign-post great insights from agile (that is iterative) and waterfall (that is plan-first) approaches and from elsewhere that add to PRINCE2.

Apparently 90% of p2 training is still a 5 day class-room event. With these materials in multiple formats you have access to an advantage here too.

• The advantage and difference over a classroom course is that a weeks course lasts a week!. You can’t speed a classroom course up, here you determine your pace in this course. The opposite challenge is you can’t slow a class course down or rewind it. A week’s class-work with an exams at its end is often too time constrained to properly address both the exams and needs beyond.
• So it is the real value of the beyond that gets dropped to meet constraints of fixed timescale and the more visible result of an exam pass. What is learnt in a week is often forgotten in a month because its real-world relevance was out of focus.

Mindful that some people approach p2 because they want to gain project management from a zero start I am careful to ensure that explanations are accessible without any pre-requisite knowledge. This course IS suitable if you have no prior knowledge of project management. I’m also mindful that some people just want to add a badge to their experience for CV/ resume purposes.

• So our explanations are carefully aligned to the p2 syllabus (more explanation soon) and here too is a difference because these materials are deliberately friendly to people who are now or will in the future be working in places where agile and or The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK®-Guide) and APM_BoK is used.
• If you already hold a PMP for example these materials are designed for you and you can take the Practitioner exam without taking the foundation. This applies to IPMA qualifications too but be aware you’ll need the p2 foundation level factual knowledge, it is cheaper because you’ve one less exam to sit but it isn’t necessarily less study effort. If you are a scrum or SAFe practitioner these materials are likewise designed to link to your existing knowledge but these are approaches recognised by axelos as exempting you from the foundation so won’t save you from having to jump the foundation hurdle before taking the practitioner exam.
• However the explanations I give will bridge the vocabularies used for the concepts to allow existing expertise to help your easier learning and so that the p2 knowledge becomes more alive in your personal work context.

Mixing support for learners with varied levels of starting knowledge introduces another key course element

• As an experienced trainer I have added sound techniques of instructional design
  • The journey through these materials carefully builds explanations – for that reason doing them in sequence is recommended.
  • The instructional design is lots of invisible stuff like ►always expanding acronyms, ►like using the words Section and Sub-Section (§) to refer to chunks of the course materials and reserving the word chapter to unambiguously refer to the official manual, also ►consistent Sub-Section structure, also ►a base diagram that sets out the whole p2 universe, and ►consistent colour schemes, also ►iterative and incremental coverage to build topic explanations, ►our unique process-on-a-page detailed and definitive highly distilled revision aids and ►full instructor support via online support such as forums (details shortly), also ► the breaking of topics into bite-sized chunks (§ Sub-Sections) and more
  • Together they directly aid study, ►accelerate learning, ►boost recall and ►smooth your path to assimilate what you need to know for qualification and beyond as a competent practitioner.

Another difference in these materials is these slides, the narrations and revision questions are so comprehensive and detailed that they are all you need for success.

• You don’t need the official manual which saves money and time and anyway it was written as a reference source while these materials are specifically a study guide.
• You may have heard the practitioner exam is open book and so want a copy to take into the exam.
• In lesson §9 that is Sub-Section 9 I’ll explain why the chief examiner says that is maybe not as helpful as it first sounds but if you do want a copy, then it is available from my website at a healthy discount.
• Equally Amazon and many other book sellers discount it too and for many locations I can’t equal Amazon, for postage and packing or their speed of despatch.

WHAT you will need to sit the exams and can’t get from book sellers or other sources is a sponsoring ATO.

• That is exactly what my company, Logical Model Ltd is
• When you are ready you can register on our website at LML P2 Exams Home – you don’t need to remember that URL as it is in §5: ‘Booking and Taking Your Exam With Confidence’

But, hey Lets get started with what is p2 – Depending on delivery platform you may need to click somewhere such as the slide’s background to move on.

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Logical Model Ltd ©2016

§0 s3 = Section 2.1 – Course Notes (Overview & Introduction) Foundation & Practitioner Exam Success Be Qualified Advance Your Job Prospects Promotions and Pay Grade

§0 V2 (3 of 454)::Foundation & Practitioner Exam Success Be Qualified Advance Your Job Prospects Promotions and Pay Grade ::

• The word PRINCE2 when written officially in upper case with the registered trademark sign is a bit shouty so to soften our coverage I’ll abbreviate it in most places to p2.
  • When written in full p2 is an acronym that stands for Projects in Controlled Environments
  • An accurate description of what it is.

p2 is a control framework.

• It is made up of people in defined roles
• Those people carry out processes described by detailed activity steps that lead to decision making checkpoints based on a set of information templates.
• People plus process plus completed templates equals decision making control – P2 in total.

To justify some of our “Ways these materials are pmbok and agile friendly, and how they are more valuable as a result for everyone lets survey their similarities and differences”

• You may have heard of and be wondering about Agile and or about the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (The PMBoK-Guide®) and thus the Project Management Professional (or PMP®) exam.
• And so be wondering “which is the best method? How are they different?”

The “best method?” question is from the wrong perspective

• PRINCE2 , Agile and the PMBoK-Guide complement each other almost perfectly
• To run projects in the real world you need the insights from all of them. Between them they have very little overlap and all contain important knowledge. Even together they are less than everything we need for success.

To illustrate I have to use a little unexplained jargon, I apologise in advance. It’s the only time in these materials that I will use terms without fully explaining them at the point of first use. Rest assured they will all be covered later.

• The PMBoK-Guide and Agile both provide details of tools and techniques for scheduling workloads like Sprint Planning Meetings or Critical Path Analysis, insight into Team Development and tools like Earned Value or Burn charts.
• All these PMBoK and Agile tools and techniques are the day to day How-To skills of planning and tracking. Vital stuff but PMBoK has little to say about project structure while agile says a little but is mostly product development orientated
• In contrast structure and control is p2’s great strength but p2 tells us very little about how to schedule or how-to track status. Instead p2 says its important, tells use when and who, sets out the what but leaves out the how to; this is often a surprise and disappointment to people hoping p2 is their complete guide to a new role. §19 of these materials goes some way to remedy this shortfall
• So each of PMBOK, Agile and p2 have complementary focusses. PMBoK-Guide has little to say about the overall framework of managing projects such as achieving approvals or delegate work packages or trigger interventions but PMBoK is strong on describing tools to schedule, to budget and to track.
• P2 gives structure, timing and roles that leverage PMBoK explanations of how to schedule, albeit pmbok has an assumed planning approach of plan before taking action. Agile is strongest on product development and uses a plan as you go approach; plan a bit, do a bit, plan a bit more etc. Neither p2 nor PMBoK-Guide do more than acknowledge the existence of product development activities in their guidance while agile excels here and p2 is as happy with an agile iterative planning approach as it is with a pmbok plan up front waterfall approach.

What p2 brings to Agile and PMBoK-Guide is communication flows for unbeatable best practices in delegation and escalation between the organisation’s layers of ►Direct, ►Manage, and ►Deliver whether we are agile/ iterative or PMBoK waterfall/ plan in advance in our development approach. If these are alien terms they will get explained once we get into content delivery rather than scene setting

• P2 is flexible guidance on the communication flows. This makes it as suitable for complex projects and novel projects for simple projects, for civil engineering or for corporate change projects and anything in between
• So p2 says little or nothing about how to create the contents of those information flows. PMBoK-Guide and Agile tell us how to populate those flows but tell us less about the who and when of each flow’s end-points or how to configure the controls or how to respond to the content once the reports are flowing. All aspects that p2 is strong on.
• PRINCE2 assumes you have the ability to groom backlogs and create resource levelled schedules or operate kanban boards. P2 assumes you have the knowledge of how to track a project’s actual status in the ways that depend on Conditions of Satisfaction or Acceptance Criteria to complete its progress report templates.

By the time we are done in this course you’ll appreciate the mix; you will be able to decide which elements of the technical work of the project should be agile sprints-and-releases and which are better controlled using a waterfall approach. P2 tells us nothing about either but equally it provides the perfect framework for both agile sprints and waterfall phases

• Since p2 tells you “Time to report progress” but not how to calculate and track status versus intention it means P2 is as happy if you use ►burn-downs from agile or ►Gantt charts and Earned Value from the PMBoK or ►both or ►neither. P2 is truly a flexible project control approach
• I think that’s the end of un-introduced terms for illustration. If you don’t know those terms worry not; I will explain every piece of jargon as it’s use is introduced.
  • Anyway, what we’ve just been discussing means p2 has to be combined with either agile techniques such as burn-down charts or PMBoK-Guide techniques like earned value So in this course I’ll link and sign-post the cross overs, some I’ll explain and the rest you’ll know to follow-up on post qualification,

Agile is generally suited to small teams of highly skilled people who deliver against evolving goals over short timescales while P2 is a chameleon.

• I’ve used it formally in small teams and I used it in a 400 person project without every saying “lets do prince”. I know of multi-billion dollar projects running over multiple years which when you scratch their surface will reveal p2 under the corporate paint work. I suspect most of the people involved don’t know they are following p2.
• P2 adds to agile, it allows us to operate agile across multiple concurrent teams within the project or mixed agile and design first based teams
• In fact PMBoK-Guide and Agile fit into p2 like a hand in a glove.
• More than just compatible they deliver synergy; the combination is greater than the parts on their own.

As we go you will hear me say <Sync or <Next >. If you do and everything stops then you are on a platform like html5 where you need to click to move on. A Click on the slide background generally works, but varies by platform. Guidance in a couple of slides time.

• On pure video I will have supplied the click.
• On video served from an interactive player it will depend on context. Lets move to the next slide and I’ll say a little more <Next >

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VnCtl:29/08/2016 21:42:05 This file is part of Logical Model Ltd’s p2FdtnAndPrctnt training course