News

Good news! QRP now offers a course that is specially designed for hospitals and aims to introduce hospital staff to the basics and best practices of project management. The training focuses on improving project management within your organisation and aims at developing the existing project operation. At the end of this training, you will be able to act as a qualified member and collaborator of a project management team within the hospital.

What are the objectives of the PM for Hospitals Training?

You work in the hospital and are (going to be) part of the project team? This could be for you. Following the completion of the course, you should:

• Understand the main concepts related to projects and why projects are carried out
• Define a project, create a project plan and monitor it
• Translate the Best Practices of project management to a hospital environment

It is desirable, but not essential, that you have some work-experience on projects. The module does not lead to certification, so there is no examination.

Why the PM for Hospitals Training could be relevant for you?

The PM for Hospitals Training is for everyone involved in Project Management related to the hospital sector. But more in particular, this could be:

• Project Managers and Coordinators
• Project Members
• Project Team Members
• Team Managers
• Staff Members

Why is Project Management important in healthcare?

Project management in healthcare is distinct because it takes complexity and risk to a whole new level. There has been an increase in the number of healthcare professionals over the last years. The amount of work that healthcare organisations require for project management to continually improve operations is large. Read more: healthcare project management challenges and benefits.

Benefits of Healthcare Project Management

Strong project management helps improve healthcare and hospitals in a number of ways. Project Management for Hospitals can ensure:

• That the technical composition of the project team is based on the project objectives
• That team members can implement the project
• That the politics of integration are not underestimated
• That team members genuinely relate to each other as peers

Project Management for Hospitals can improve:

• Quality of care by improving processes
• Communication among healthcare staff
• Organizational planning
• Budgeting
• Relations with stakeholders
• Staff productivity
• The mitigation of the risk

Want to know more? Visit our PM for Hospitals course page!

You find a job offer that attracts you and want to apply... but how can you highlight your qualifications? Certifications can be useful in making your application stand out in the recruitment process. Whether you have a long career, several degrees or masters, or professional training that has led to professional certifications, there are many ways to include these certifications in a CV to catch the recruiter's eye. Professional certifications demonstrate a certain passion for you as a candidate. It can be a particular interest in the industry, or the profession in which you work and therefore be proof of specific expertise and skills. As a first step, you should evaluate your various certifications and decide for each certificate whether or not it is relevant and significant enough to include on your CV for the position in question. Obviously, if the advertisement explicitly states that the company is looking for a profile with certain certifications and the recruiter does not find these certifications for the job on your CV, you may not be selected. Hence the importance of highlighting your professional certifications. Any certification can make your CV shine and be the thing that makes the difference. However, there are rules for highlighting your qualifications on your CV.

Where to put my certifications on my CV?

If they are critical to the job, you can put them in four places:

1. After your name
2. At the top of your CV summary
3. In a special certifications section
4. In your work experience section

What information should I include?

A certification is a document that proves that you have acquired a specific skill and is issued by an accredited body. When adding a certification to your CV, specify the following information:

• Name of the certification
• Name of the certification authority
• Date obtained

Remember that valid certifications are only issued by a third party with an appropriate licence.

How to list an ongoing certification on your CV?

You can include a certification that is still in progress on your CV, if it is essential for the job you are applying for, by adding the words "in progress" or "ongoing", to the description, and specifying the expected completion date.

Can I include an expired certification on my CV?

Generally It is not acceptable to list old or expired certifications on a CV. If you have a certification with a possible expiration date, it is essential that you renew your certification before that date in order to include them on your resume. Finally, it is very important not to include certifications that you do not have.

How can I include my certification on my Linkedin profile?

It is possible to add your certification to your Linkedin profile. Indeed, certifications are a great way to highlight your professional knowledge and achievements also on your LinkedIn profile. Here is the link to find out how: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/44644/manage-licenses-certifications?lang=en

Insider Tip

When you follow a course with different levels of certification, for example PRINCE2, which offers the PRINCE2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner certifications:

• If you get the Practitioner level, write PRINCE2 Practitioner
• If you are only awarded the Foundation level, write PRINCE2 (without specifying Foundation)

In this way your certification retains its positive effect with recruiters and demonstrates that you have mastered the basics of the method.

QRP International Belgium launched its Best Practices Blog on June 14, 2019 and it has already collected more than 15,000 views. A big thank you for your loyalty throughout this past year. Would you like to know the 10 topics that interested you most in 2021 on our Best Practices Blog? Here are the top posts of this year. The opportunity for you, we hope, is to (re)discover some of them:

1. Who is the Scrum developer?
2. Output, outcome and benefits of a project: what are the differences?
3. ITIL 4 Specialist Create, Deliver & Support Exam
4. How to write a PID? (Project Initiation Documentation)
5. What makes Project Management in the Hospital sector unique?
6. 8 Common Causes of Project Failure (and how to avoid them!)
7. AgilePM versus Scrum
8. Who is the PMO Manager: role & responsibilities
9. The New PMBoK 7: the Dawn of a New Era
10. What is PRINCE2?

The new year is already approaching and we will continue to offer you more and more relevant articles to best meet your expectations. If you have any questions that you would like us to answer, topics that are of particular interest to you, or if you would like to collaborate with us in writing blog posts, please contact us at belgium@qrpinternational.com. We would like to take this opportunity to inform you that each new post is announced on our  QRP International BelgiumLinkedin page. You can also subscribe to our monthly if you prefer. We wish you all a very Happy New Year 2022.

The time of good weather, long evenings and outdoor activities is upon us. Summer is somehow always paired with reaching goals. ‘The perfect summer body’, ‘the nicest vacation’ or finishing all the ‘left up chores’. What if this year you consider reaching a professional goal? The summer months seem short and are always packed with fun weekends, vacation and outings. But at the same time, summertime is also the time where there is more time to relax and time to get you prepared for the busy last months of the year. So, how do we combine all this, a goal, a relaxed mindset and some more time on your hands. What about getting a certification that will help sustain your career and improve your capabilities? It is to be imagined that nobody wants to spend their summer day in a classroom or behind closed doors in their home-office. So what if you could study in the evening, the early morning or a quick hour at lunch? E-learning could be your summer solution!

PRINCE2 and ITIL 4 Foundation E-learning

QRP Belgium currently has two courses that we offer via E-learning, others are in full development and will launch later this year. Currently we offer PRINCE2 E-learning, the Foundation, Practitioner and Combi courses and the ITIL 4 Foundation. Both courses are available in English and in French and provide the voucher for the online exam. You have six (ten in case of the PRINCE2 combi) months to complete the course and the exam and can schedule your learning whenever you want.

PRINCE2

PRINCE2 (Projects IN Controlled Environment) is a structured method for the effective and efficient management of projects. The PRINCE2 methodology is widely adopted around the world, used by people and organisations in wide-ranging industries and sectors. PRINCE2 helps to successfully deliver projects of any size or complexity. Built from a wealth of experience and knowledge, PRINCE2 provides the essentials for managing any project. PRINCE2 provides a common language across a project and the necessary controls and breakpoints to work successfully within a contractual framework. PRINCE2 is a flexible method that guides you through the essentials for managing successful projects, regardless of type or scale. Built upon seven principles, themes and processes, PRINCE2 can be tailored to meet your specific requirements.

ITIL 4 Foundation

ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world, and is used globally by millions of practitioners. For over 25 years, ITIL has been providing organisations with practical guidance to improve IT services. ITIL is fundamental to businesses, enables transformation and helps organisations realize value. The last version of the framework, ITIL 4, is built on established ITSM practices and expands itself to the wider context of customer experience, value streams and digital transformation, as well as embracing new ways of working, such as Lean, Agile, and DevOps. ITIL 4 provides a practical and flexible basis to support organisations on their journey to the new world of digital transformation. ITIL provides an end-to-end IT/digital operating model for the delivery and operation of tech-enabled products and services and enables IT teams to continue to play a crucial role in wider business strategy.

2021 Summer deal

QRP has the objective to help professionals grow and develop constantly. That is why we want to sustain your professional goals for this summer. In order to do so, we now provide a 10% discount on all E-learning. Available for July & August, do not miss your opportunity to learn and improve your skills!

“Is it possible to learn how to be better at managing change in an agile world?”. This was the question Melanie Franklin, renowned Agile & Change Management expert, transformed into an answer. In 2014 she published the book “Agile Change Management – a practical framework for successful change planning and implementation”. The book provides an approach for managing transformational change initiatives, using a lot of the ideas from the agile methodologies. This book has led to the creation of the Agile Change Agent qualification. Two years ago we had the opportunity to interview Melanie Franklin and today we are proud to announce the launch of the Agile Change Agent courses.

Agile Change Agent: an agile approach to change

An Agile approach to change is about doing change in waves of change. According to Melanie Franklin, Agile Change Management is about accepting that in this world of very fast moving change, it is not a good idea to try and plan every single change detail upfront. The Agile Change Agent course & certification provides the participant with guidelines to those that want to work in a change. The course provides insight into how to plan and manage all the activities that are needed to design, deliver and adopt change in an Agile way. The course answers the questions “What makes a change successful?” “What is it that we really need to know to make a change successful?” “How can we manage our changes in an agile world?”. It is not about what you have to do but how you are supposed to do it, the techniques you can use.

Are you an Agile Change Agent?

You are a change agent if you are responsible for the creation of new ways of working as a result of a project investment. Or if you are in a change management role, where you are identifying what needs to be done by those who are going to have to work differently. But you are also a change agent if you are impacted by change in sales, marketing, HR, finance or other departments. You have daily priorities, you use existing ways of working to satisfy current customer demand and get the job done, but you are also mobilizing your colleagues and yourself to participate in the changes your organisation makes/decides. So you are acting as a change agent. Understanding activities for effective change management and including them in your Agile project plan increases the chances that the deliverables from your project will be adopted as new business as usual working practices. People may not be called Change Agents but the point is that on top of their daily job they have a role to help make change happen and ultimately integrate change into the current ways of working.

Why the Agile Change Agent course could be relevant for you?

• Agile and change explained on a practical level
• The course contains many problem solving techniques
• You can benefit from a practical kit of techniques, checklists and tools so you can start managing your change projects using what you have learnt from the moment you leave the course
• The course helps those who know about change understand Agile, and those who know about Agile learn about change
• You can get a qualification on your CV that proves you have skills in Agile and Change Management - hitting the two hottest topics in business today.

Want to know more? Visit our Agile Change Agent page

You know what we love to do? Invite you to grow professionally and help you decide on the Best Practice that will change your business forever. In order to do so, we provide quality content that will explain the differences between all the possibilities out there. We ask our trainers to communicate clear and profound what the benefits are of a certain certification.

We realized that the best way to communicate this information is by means of (online) events. Free of charge and without the aim of selling you a solution, we hope to reach you to start thinking about the different possibilities that fit your needs.

User Groups 

Different organisations and professionals continue to express their need for information, comparison and examples to us. In order to respond to these needs we invented the PMO User Group and the ITIL User Group. We communicate with our User groups by means of the PMO User Group Bulletin and the ITIL User Group Bulletin that we send out regularly. In these we refer to the latest dedicated blog posts, important certification updates/news and we try to increase the interaction between professionals. However, more importantly is that we also host User Group events. The PMO User Group events and the ITIL User Group events are held regularly and have the aim to discuss a broad range of topics related to either the PMO or ITIL. Not one of these events is the same, we constantly seek to offer an interactive and challenging event. We invite speakers that share a case study, set up break out rooms to discuss questions or host small workshops/games. Click here to register for the next PMO User Group - From Project to Portfolio Management and here for the next ITIL User Group - Using ITIL to improve co-creation game with business.

Events and event recordings

Every quarter we try to host at least one (online) event about one of the Best Practice methodology training we provide. This is an event that reaches a big group of people and is usually in a webinar format. We invite either our trainer or another expert to shine a light on a specific topic of interest. At the end of the event attendees are invited to ask questions and interact with the speaker. This way - we try to answer all doubts and really give an insight of how the best practice could possibly help sustain your business goals. We found that it was really helpful to record these events, in order to be able share the recording with those that missed the live events. I like to invite you to take a look at the event that we have organized in the past year. How to apply PRINCE2 virtually? We invited our expert Project Manager and accredited trainer Stijn Janssens to talk about Projects in a virtual environment, specifically with the use of PRINCE2. During this interesting webinar he covered topics such as communication, changes of processes and lessons learned. Watch the recording here. Agile Frameworks The term Agile always raises room for discussion, there are many different opinions and perspectives. We asked our expert and accredited trainer Kim Delgadillo to once and for all explain about the different Agile Frameworks. During his webinar, Kim touched upon Scrum, Kanban, Design thinking, SaFe and of course AgilePM. Watch the recording here. Scrum master by APMG SCRUM is a methodology that changed the way of work for thousands of organisations. It helps prioritize and deliver. One of the most important roles within the SCRUM set up is the SCRUM Master, but what does he/she actually do? In this webinar our expert Kim Delgadillo takes you on a journey into the world of the SCRUM Master, the role and responsibilities. Watch the recording here. What is PMP and why should I invest in it? The PMP certification is a very prestigious certification. PMP is not a methodology, but an approach to project management in general. Getting PMP certified is not easy and asks for perseverance. In this webinar our expert and accredited PMP trainer Xavier Heusdens explains the ins and outs of the PMP certification. Watch the recording here. PMP Panel discussion PMP is gaining more and more ground in Belgium and the certification really covers Project Management from beginning to end. With the launch of both the new exam and new PMBoK in 2021, the certification has become more relevant than ever. To show the wide reach and uses of the PMP knowledge we hosted a panel discussion. The experts discussed different topics amongst each other, but we also asked the audience to interact and ask questions. Watch the recording here.