Posted by BJ on 26 January, 2010 under APMP & accreditation | 
Strategic Proposals offers APMP Foundation Level Accreditation Exam Preparation Workshops (dare we refer to these as APMPFLAEPW?) on both sides of the Atlantic. Last year alone Jon and I have delivered 17 workshops, with a total of 142 participants*.
The exam is a pass/fail and scores aren’t revealed. That said, after each course, both Jon and I review the scores, calculate the average score for the group, etc.
An interesting aspect to the scores is that, very consistently, the person with the least amount of experience receives one of the lower scores and the person with the most experience tends to have one of the highest scores. Average scores tend to range from 55-65 (candidates must answer 42 out of the 75 questions correctly to pass.). The passing rate for those attending the workshop is very high (98% in the US) and those who have not passed the exam, from my perspective as the facilitator clearly did not have the understanding of proposals required to answer the questions.
I know this seems like common sense and I guess it is. I point this out to demonstrate that the exam does do a good job of testing a candidates understanding of the basic knowledge of proposal that someone with over a year of experience would have.
*Did you know that the number of people who achieved APMP Foundation Level accreditation this year is 54% higher than last year? Did you know that, to date, more than 1350 people are APMP accredited? At this rate, by the next annual conference (June, 2010, a majority of the members of APMP will have some level of accreditation. Will you be one of them or will you be playing catch up?
Posted by Jon on 18 January, 2010 under APMP & accreditation, Processes & best practice |
Whilst presenting an APMP Foundation Level training course to a group before Christmas, I found myself getting frustrated by the negative spin that the examiners take on the “Learning review” process. What’s the point, according to the syllabus, of a lessons learnt process? It’s to “recognize systemic process issues and drive their resolution”; the aim is “to do better next time”.
It struck me that whoever developed this section of APMP’s competency framework must have had some pretty bad personal experiences running proposals. If the learning review is so negative – working from the assumption that so much went on that was wrong, that so many things need to be corrected – then it’s no wonder that it can be hard to secure people’s open, frank participation in the process. The working assumption underlying the “white review” would appear to be that the proposal team has just endured a soul-destroying journey into the valley of despair – and the inevitable risk is that those who do participate in the learning process will approach the exercise feeling defensive, confrontational and negative.
No, a learning review should be framed in a positive way. Look to celebrate what went well on the bid – those things you’d do again; the things that worked; the things you’d want other teams to try on their next proposal effort. And then – without attributing blame – look at what the team would have done differently (with the benefit of hindsight, even), or would want to approach in a different way the next time around. After all, even the most successful bids aren’t all plain sailing – and so many unsuccessful teams do so much cool stuff without quite getting across the finishing line in first place.
Posted by Jon on 29 April, 2009 under APMP & accreditation |
Good news for those of you contemplating taking the APMP Foundation Level exam, especially in the UK!
Since the pricing of the exam is set in US dollars, and sterling has been weak, APMP announced immediately before Christmas that the price for those taking the exam in the UK would increase by over 30% from 1January 2009.
Needless to say, as a member of the APMP Accreditation Steering Committee, I immediately wrote a note protesting against the rise, and a meeting of the full committee was called as a result. Following that, I’m pleased to say that the exam fees for APMP members have been reduced from 1 April. The sterling rate’s come down from £300 to £250; the dollar fee has also been cut from $450 to $400.
It’s taken some clever negotiating by chief examiner Cathy Day to sort out the reduction – as well as financial contributions towards the price reduction from APMP, APM Group (who administer the exam) and the Approved Training Organisations (such as our own company, Strategic Proposals). Our thanks to Cathy for all of her efforts. But I have to say I’m feeling rather pleased that I challenged the price rises in the first place, when everyone else seemed to be going along with them so merrily.
Posted by Jon on 23 January, 2009 under APMP & accreditation |
My recent ponderings about the APMP Foundation Level qualification also made me wonder about the folks who get the highest marks in the exams at the end of our courses – not, of course, that we can ever share anything other than a simple “pass” or “fail” with candidates (a source of some frustration, to us as much as to many of you).
I guess the profile of the perfect participant would encompass some non-proposal attributes (inherent intellect, short-term memory, academic ability, exam technique, skill at revision) as well as your proposal experience – where a track record of managing proposal teams (rather than writing them all yourself!) within a more formal, defined process on which you’ve been trained in the past will certainly help. And fluent English is a big advantage.
That’s not to say that if all of these don’t ring true for you, you won’t pass; the overwhelming majority of those who come through the doors into our classes do. You just won’t be one of those folks who accumulate enough marks in the first two columns on the exam sheet (comprising 50 questions) to have reached the pass mark of 42 before we even score your final column of answers!
Posted by Jon on 16 December, 2008 under APMP & accreditation |
Thanks to a couple of readers for their emails in response to my previous post. Both discussed the challenges that may prevent some of those who’ve passed the APMP Foundation Level exam from moving on to the next level, Practitioner.John Chennells works in Logica’s UK Proposal Centre. He attended a Practitioner workshop we ran at the recent UKAPMP annual conference, and wrote:
With impeccable timing, your latest posting appeared the other day just as I was completing the first draft of my Practitioner level submission. Everything you said about it in the workshop at Stansted is true – it has taken an incredibly long time to complete.
It’s particularly difficult to make sure you cover all the mandatory points, and make anything more than unsubstantiated statements, in just a couple of hundred words. And at times the answers required do seem to get very repetitive – I found I kept harking back to the same half-dozen examples. I suspect the rate of uptake would be rather greater if there were (say) twenty questions, but you could write perhaps 400 words on each. The answers might be a bit more interesting for the reader then, too.
Meanwhile, Sally Buttery (UK Bid Team Manager for Siemens Enterprise Communications) questions the ease of securing organisations’ sponsorship for Practitioner level. She recently passed Foundation Level on one of our courses, but:
Although I could find the time to progress to the next level(s) within APMP, I could not realistically justify the expenditure financially. In recessionary times, training is often the first to fall foul of ‘cost cutting’ and I could not envisage how a practitioner’s or professional accreditation from APMP could aid the company (my employer).
The dilemma APMP faces is that the foundation level is straightforward and achievable by most and many companies are willing to make this investment. However, many employers do want to spend more for the [Practitioner] accreditation which (is seen) to primarily benefit the individual’s objectives, and therefore, RoI is not evident.
That’s an interesting perspective. I’d think that Practitioner should actually be easier to justify internally. After all, Foundation Level tests one’s understanding of best practice, whereas Practitioner tests its application. I see Practitioner as a development process, whereby candidates assess which areas of best practice they currently apply, then fill in the gaps as they work on live deals, then sit the exam. So, done right, there should be a direct Return on Investment for their organisation.
There are some interesting lessons in all of this for APMP, I think. I’ll feed the comments into the Accreditation Steering Group next time it meets.
Posted by Jon on 10 December, 2008 under APMP & accreditation, Musings |
It struck me recently that I must have helped a rather large number of people pass their APMP Foundation Level exam since we were endorsed as an APMP Approved Training Organisation a couple of years ago. There are well over a hundred of you out there who’ve passed having attended one of my sessions, which is well over 10% of the total to have attained the qualification.
Now, we’ve never really seen the APMP accreditation scheme as a money-making operation; BJ and I participate in it because we’re passionate about its importance to the profession. If one calculated our investment in accreditation, and weighed that against our continuing efforts to offer training in this area as cost-effectively as possible, the balance sheet would horrify our bank managers. Indeed, we’ve even donated the proceeds of events in the past to the Association’s coffers; I’m willing to be corrected, but I think we were the first to do so.
But we love meeting the range of people who come into our classes – from different industry sectors, from organisations of wildly differing sizes, from clients old and new. And it occurs to me to wonder how these folks fare after the course. I’d welcome any comments on the following, either here or by email:
1. Has Foundation Level proved useful? Has it helped you learn new tricks, provided you with an injection of confidence, made you more credible with your colleagues, helped you gain a pay rise, strengthened your c.v., been useful in gaining a new job?
2. Not that high a proportion of those passing Foundation worldwide have yet moved on to reach Practitioner level. What inhibits them? Is it time, cost, fear of failure, the breadth of the syllabus, lack of the necessary three years’ experience?
Posted by Jon on 28 November, 2008 under APMP & accreditation |
Tan Parmar of design agency Redwood was another of the presenters at last month’s UKAPMP conference. I enjoyed his comments on designing magazine covers: the parallels to proposals are evident. “Covers are really important,” Tan explained. “A good cover should encapsulate the mood and tone of the magazine.”
His design checklist for a good magazine cover? Simplicity, clean typography, and visual impact. Not many of the proposal covers I see – often cluttered and uninspiring – would pass the test.
Tan also outlined one of the benefits of good design: “when you’re skimming through the magazine, you can access information really, really quickly.” Again, that’s so similar to our world, where evaluators need to be able to navigate our documents quickly and easily, whilst absorbing our key messages.
