I found this diagram useful to explain how the various activities and plans within a programme combine to add value for the programme sponsoring group and stakeholders:
Why do we need a Quality Management Strategy? In an earlier post I wrote about my confusion when starting to think about how to create a quality management strategy for my programme. Let’s go back to basics – why do we need a Quality Management Strategy? Fundamentally it’s about ensuring (to an acceptable level of certainty) that the Programme will deliver what it sets out to deliver. And that is about Value.
I’ve been thinking about how to put together a Quality Management Strategy for the programme I am shaping. Question is, where to start… The MSP Manual says: […] used to define and establish the activities for managing quality across the programme which sounds tautologous to me. In Chapter 9 on Quality Management, a bit more detail appears: The Quality Management Strategy defines what criteria will be used to assess quality, what quality activities will be incorporated into the management and delivery of the programme, who will be responsible for carrying out these activities, and how the programme will meet required audit and organisational standards for quality assurance and quality control.
I’m still going to the gym, although as I [cref 1025 mentioned] I’m giving organised classes a miss for a while. I’ve been a few times since my last post, and wanted to capture some of the things I’ve (re-)discovered. It’s much easier to focus on aerobic training if you use a Heart Rate Monitor When the gym is busy, it’s surprising how long it takes to move between exercises, especially if you are using free weights and need to set the weight on each exercise.
I’ve decided to retire the “Sources” page I put in place when I moved my blogroll off the front page. Although the page was dynamically updated by my then feed-reader (Bloglines), my account on there has lain dormant for some time, so the page has long-since ceased to be a current indication of the sources I refer to. My feed-reader of choice, (or perhaps “information aggregator” would be a better name) is Awasu, and although it would be fairly easy to export an OPML of my current reading and upload it somewhere on this blog, I’m not sure that it is worth the effort.
The new version of MSP has been launched, amongst the authors are my ex-colleague Rod Sowden, and Patrick Mayfield, who I haven’t met, but whose training company seem to do good work! Now to get on a refresh course…
As I mentioned on Saturday, I’m looking for ways to get more engaged with my fitness activities, and as my new gym offers a range of classes within the monthly membership fee, I thought I’d try out a couple.
First exploration was last night, when I tried a class called BodyPump™. This is described in the gym brochure as A non impact resistance class, using barbells and adjustable weights. This class works all major muscles using a variety of exercises including squats, lifts and curls., which sounded like the sort of thing I wanted…
It seems that many of the classes offered in gyms are licensed products, so 5 seconds in Google allowed me to find the website of the company who created this class. There’s an extensive description of what’s involved, and some videos too, so you know what to expect.
The last time I was involved in any king of group fitness activity (about seven years ago) it looked like this – no air-conditioning, no trademarks on the workouts, as far as I could tell no-one was ever wearing lycra, and the instructors definitely didn’t have fake tans!
I felt a little self-conscious lining up for last night’s event, especially when the instructor and most of the other participants appeared to have fake tan and lycra in sufficient quantities to open a shop… Also notable that even though I’d picked what sounded like one of the more “gender-balanced” classes, there were only two of us males to a dozen females…
Over the years I’ve been an intermittent visitor to the halls of fitness. From a peak in my mid-twenties when I did a lot of cycling (including a season of pretending to race!) it’s been something of a long-term decline over the last two decades, punctuated by occasional interludes of pushing back up the hill for a while. Earlier this year, incentivised by our impending wedding, my partner and I threw ourselves into a six-week gym intensive, complete with personal trainer assistance.
I’ve merged the two wikis into a new, single wiki, and changed technology to WikkaWiki. .htaccess changes should take care of any old links – please let me know of any broken ones by commenting on this post.
This mini-project came about because I had a need to give people route instructions for a party. It’s easy to use Google Maps to set up a customised route by adding placemarks at navigationally-significant locations (see this example), and you can easily add instructions (including pictures) at each point (try clicking on one of the “map pins”). However in the real world, there is nothing to beat having a list of instructions that each person can print out.