Project Planning & Control

The Project Planning & Control™ qualification scheme supports the publication of the Association for Project Management (APM) guide, ‘Planning, Scheduling, Monitoring and Control – The Practical Project Management of Time, Cost and Risk.’ The book is the APM’s first comprehensive set of guidance and best practice for project planning and control and is applicable across all industries and sectors.

The development of the supporting qualification is part of our continuing partnership with the APM.

The guidance is the result of work by the APM Planning Monitoring and Control SIG at their regular meetings over the last 2 years, and is based on Practitioner experience from both customer and supplier perspectives. The intention of the guidance is to help raise understanding so that standards can be set by organizations against a common text to ensure that they can assure a set standard and aim for best practice as well as get value for money from their projects. Above all the intention is to provide greater certainty over project delivery.

The supporting qualification scheme will provide training and certification to equip project planners with the tools needed to be effective and to demonstrate their competence in a competitive marketplace.

Project Planning & Control™ guidance and training will:-

• Give a step by step controls guide from project initiation to execution
• Provide a holistic overview of the interdependencies between planning and controls functions
• Be a practical and scalable companion to almost any project controls professional
• Enable effective capability growth for delivery organizations

There has been very little guidance for practicing and aspiring planning and controls professionals to gain understanding of best practice, and how to apply it. The APM PSM&C guide and its associated training have been developed not in academic isolation - but with many years of on the job experience. The guide is written in plain English - so even if this is your first experience in the field of planning and controls you should feel comfortable reading, understanding and working towards success.

Individuals will gain:-

• Understanding of minimum standards and best practice
• Guidance on how to comply with Works Information requirements laid out in contracts
• Learn lessons from a wide base of delivery organizations
• Benefit from a broad perspective of experienced controls practitioners

Leveraging organizational maturity and the intrinsic benefits requires a level of functional standardization. Only then can future gains be identified, optimized and harvested. For many years the question around what good looks like for planning and controls has been spread across many sectors, individuals and organizations. To address this issue the APM presents its first edition in an attempt to drive this most important of project management areas forward.

Implementation of PPC in a standardized manner delivers the following advantages:

• Technical competence of team members
• Improved quality of schedules leading to more certainty in project delivery
• Greater predictability of project forecasting and success
• Higher levels of integration between controls functions i.e. cost and time.

Practitioner Level

Exam Format

• Complex Multiple Choice
• 8 question paper with 10 marks available per question
• 40 marks required to pass (out of 80 available) – 50%
• 3 hour duration
• Open-book (Project Planning & Control guide only)