Three weeks on Friday I will be sitting my APMP exam. I’m not sure where the time is going to be honest but I’m now getting well and truly stuck into my revision before starting my week long course in October. This week I have been reviewing the Project Management in Context section and the Organisation / Governance section of How to Pass the APMP: Your Journey to Professional Project Mangement by Parallel Project Training’s John Bolton and Paul Naybour, so I thought I’d give you a quick overview of what these chapters are all about.
Project Management in Context is a fairly high level chapter which should be hopefully straight forward for most candidates with some previous project exposure. The aim of the section is to essentially test candidates’ knowledge of what a project actually is in comparison to Business as Usual activity, from being able to explain the benefits of Project Management to the challenges of Project Management and the phases of the PM Lifecycle. The section is broken down into core areas such as Programme Management, Portfolio Management and Project Office Management whilst introducing concepts such as PESTLE in relation to overall project context. For those who might be unaware, PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors.
Organisation and Governance focuses in much more detail around the Project Lifecycle and the benefits of meticulously working through the individual stages. We are therefore introduced to concepts such as Project stage reviews including Gateway reviews which those used to working on OGC projects are no doubt familiar with! Another interesting aspect of this chapter is the coverage of organisational setup within a project and the different ways in which a project can be run, from functional working, to project or matrix setups. The chapter concludes with some detail around the organisational roles within specific projects, from sponsors through to Users and Suppliers, along with a discussion around project methods and the benefits that their implementation can bring to successful delivery.
From my perspective then, so far so good! That said, I can see Earned Value Management lurking over the horizon, so I’ll get back to you on that one in due course… 
