Any signs of deviation beyond tolerance levels must be escalated08:30 – like yesterday, we start with a review of last night’s homework. There’s a notable air of rising tension in the room, as we all await the real test this afternoon.
09:30 – We go through Controlling a Stage and Managing Product Delivery, and then there’s a quality bit. No, really, I mean a QUALITY bit (not that the rest was rubbish), looking at the Quality Review process.
10:30 – after coffee (and a Twix finger this time), it’s on to Change Control. This culminates in a genuine team exercise, with the people on my team being completely unable to decide whether the scenario issues are problems, change requests or off-specifications.
The pace picks up. We are rattling through the remainder of the syllabus, covering Managing Stage Boundaries, Exception Reports and Plans, and how to deal with deviation (most harshly, I would have thought - can't have these deviants carrying on with their filthy practices). Just before lunch, we finalise things (appropriately enough) with the Closing a Project process. Strangely missing is the essential sub-process which I remember vividly at the end of one banking project I ran back in 1999 – take all the contractors into a room one by one, give them a black bin liner for their stuff, and tell them to f*ck off.
12:30 – lunch was a slightly varied buffet today, but still excellent. Jam doughnuts for desert.
13:00 – post-lunch, there’s an overall review, process by process, while gallows humour predominates among the delegates.
14:00 – the exam. We have to clear our desks, and then we get a question paper and an answer matrix. It’s standard multiple choice stuff – you have to make an “X” in the chosen box. To my mind, the biggest challenge looks like ensuring your answering stays in sync with the question sequence – miss one, and you get everything wrong thereafter. What is really surprising is that it’s all done on paper – I would have thought an online version would be so much simpler and quicker to administer.
As I start, I find myself gripped by a growing sense of horror. The two test papers I had rattled through on Monday and Tuesday evening, and managed a comfortable score without trying very hard, as the answers simply jumped out at me. But this, the real exam, is much, much harder – the questions are full of ambiguity and convoluted logic. On my first pass through, I leave at least a dozen unanswered.
I managed my first pass though in about 30 minutes, more than twice as long as the mock papers had taken me. I then spend a good further 15 minutes puzzling over the skipped ones, before making a final check that my numbering sequence is correct. That’ll do. It’ll have to.
Outside, the delegates collect like condemned men.
16:00 - we are called back – and, incredibly, we have all passed (even the student – who really seemed like he’d lost the plot). Even more incredibly, we are given our scores, and I have come in only 1% less than I managed in the mock papers.
Six of our merry crew leave forever – they were just doing the Foundation course, which makes little sense to me.
The rest of us get a Practitioner course booklet – exam guidelines and sample questions. We have some to do tonight.
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