The OGC’s MSP™ provides a framework of organisation, processes, and ways of thinking in order to manage and control the work in a change programme, especially transformational change.

Our Agile approach is consistent with the Principles and Governance Themes in MSP, not least in the latest 2007 revision of MSP – the importance of effective leadership and vision, the focus on benefits, learning from experience, the need for stakeholder engagement, and transformational flow. The differences in emphasis, in executing an Agile + MSP programme, can have a dramatic impact on the design and outcome of the programme.

The world, and corporate strategy, and government policy, can change faster than you can deliver a major programme. In Agile + MSP, the programme governance therefore nurtures and develops the vision and the desired outcomes, through the often dramatic changes affecting a programme.

At the next level down, the Agile programme-as-journey concept addresses the unknown, the uncertainty, the need to explore and discover the programme. The projects reveal more detail of the outcomes and benefits, and what work and subsequent projects will be needed to complete the programme.

Agile is no substitute for MSP, but Agile shifts the balance. Agile recognises the principles of MSP as a sound framework and common language for managing programmes, but helps to set the management of programmes in the real world of uncertainty, of changing visions, resources and the criteria for success.  Agile makes whole new demands of managing successful programmes, to deliver successful outcomes.

MSP is a trade mark of the Office of Government Commerce.