MSP Training

Thinking about your capabilities with MSP

September 27, 2017

Change is something that happens within every organisation, large or small, business processes are constantly changing, developing and moving forward. Alongside this change, organisations are striving to achieve and create benefits by improving their existing practices to create an excellent organisation that is well prepared for what the future might bring. Whether it's innovation or new ways of thinking about business processes, programme management provides a structure for managing challenges, complexities and risks. The OCG who put together the MSP framework defines a capability as a “service, function, or operation that enables the organisation to exploit opportunities.”

Programme management is the management of a cluster of projects which will change an organisation so that they achieve the benefits that are of strategic importance to the business. The main objective of a programme is to bring together the different elements from a set of projects so that the overall programme will achieve more than just the outcomes of the individual projects.

MSP can be used before a programme is commissioned to consider possible courses of action and how to identify the vision and outcomes for a certain programme. This can be to deliver a new service, change contractor agreements and communications, unlock employee potential such as, creativity, experience and willingness, to look at the surplus of stock, or to simply be better than the competition. No matter what the programme MSP provides a framework for managing the challenges.

MSP looks at the business processes that are currently being applied, data, people and the capabilities that are available to deliver on what the organisation is setting out to do, MSP will then give organisations the foundations to compare exploitable capabilities with exploitable opportunities in market – are customers ready and wanting this kind of improvement or innovation? Is there potential to be disruptive? How long will the programme take and will success depend on seasonality? MSP then helps define a set of projects that when fully implemented within the organisation will enable to the organisation to achieve its goal – increased employee potential, stock levels, be better than competition etc.

Managing successful programmes consists of a set of principles and processes that are founded on best practice, but are not dictatorial. All principles are flexible and designed to be adapted to meet the needs of the organisation.