MSP For Dummies

About the Author

Alan Ferguson is the Managing Director of AFA. This training and consultancy company has specialized in change delivery practices for nearly 20 years. Starting off in project management it spread to programme, portfolio, change and risk management, P3O and a host of other disciplines related to helping organizations change. It provides training and consultancy globally, both directly and through a network of partners who use AFA training material.

Alan has been in project and programme management for an awfully long time. He was certainly looking after a collection of projects (which would now be called multi-project programme management) in the 1970s. So that means he's getting to the end of his fourth decade in this game.

His first career was as an engineering officer in the Royal Air Force. His first projects were looking after airplanes; getting them back in the air after a couple of months in a hangar. Before he left the RAF, he moved across into IT and in the late 1980s and early 1990s worked on IT projects and within so-called strategy stufies. Nowadays those strategies would be called programmes. So he really was in at the beginning of programme management.

Alan also spent a few years working in an international insurance company on IT projects and programmes. Here, and in the RAF he earned his spurs as a practising project and programme manager.

With AFA, Alan has worked with a hugely diverse range of clients in the UK, Europe and around the world. His ...