Executive Program for Permanent Secretaries & Directors-General
The ten-day residency for the state’s most senior executives. Week one rebuilds the enterprise disciplines of public leadership — strategy, delivery, finance, evidence. Week two builds the statecraft: institutions, politics, stakeholders and the board-level capstone for your own mandate.
The executive challenge
The problem this program solves
Permanent secretaries and directors-general lead institutions where authority, accountability and politics are permanently entangled — and where the operating craft is learned on the job, at public expense. This flagship residency gives them the complete toolkit in one journey: delivery architecture and evidence systems in week one; institutional, political and stakeholder craft in week two. The cohort is deliberately cross-sector — treasury, health, education, infrastructure — because the strongest learning at this level is peer-to-peer. The capstone is a board-grade agenda for each participant’s own mandate.
Context
Why this matters now
Capability
What you will be able to do
- Lead the delivery agenda of your mandate with an architecture that survives politics and turnover
- Make high-stakes public decisions with disciplined evidence and honest trade-offs
- Run the fiscal and resource dimensions of your institution with PFM discipline
- Manage the political economy of your mandate: cabinet, parliament, media, citizens and partners
- Build institutional capability that outlasts your tenure
- Produce and defend a board-ready agenda for your institution
The IPAT Course Standard
The ten-day journey
Each day is a deliberate progression in managerial capability — from strategic context, to analytical frameworks, to applied practice, to executive judgement under pressure, to a capstone that produces something your organisation keeps. The ten-day format runs as two five-day residencies, extending the journey into institutional implementation.
Delivery & Rigor
Action learning, not passive lectures
Every IPAT program is a working residency built on one discipline: analyse, decide, deploy, refine.
Pre-work, two weeks out
A mandatory reading pack, a sector dataset and a short diagnostic arrive two weeks before day one. You do not arrive to be introduced; you arrive ready to work.
Simulation under pressure
Decision rounds and data labs run on realistic, messy African data. Positions are defended, consequences are revealed, and judgement is debriefed, not answers dictated.
The 30-day accountability nudge
Thirty days after the capstone you report progress on your implementation plan and faculty respond with a structured review. The learning that sticks is the learning that is followed up.
IPAT Signature Case™
The Health Mandate in the Election Year
You are permanent secretary for health in a government entering an election year. The flagship insurance program’s claims are growing faster than the fund can pay; two counties have declared drug stock-outs; a viral story is circulating on a maternity-ward death; and cabinet wants the insurance scheme expanded to two more counties before the campaign — against your actuary’s advice.
Your decision: Decide the package you take to cabinet: expand on schedule with quiet rationing, hold expansion and fix the fund with an awkward public explanation, or expand with borrowed bridge financing — with public health, politics and your own accountability all in play.
Real-World Case Study
The Delivery Unit Generation: From the UK to the Provinces
The UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (2001) inspired a global generation of delivery approaches — later shaped by the Institute for Government’s work and Sir Michael Barber’s “Deliverology” — now operating in delivery units from Pakistan to Kenya to Latin America. Their record is real but conditional: units work when the political principal owns the agenda and the data is honest, and fail when they become reporting theatres.
The lesson: Delivery is an architecture, not an app: leadership ownership, honest data and escalation discipline are what make the difference — exactly the craft this residency builds.
IPAT Data Lab™
A new permanent secretary inherits a mandate with three flagship programs, and can only fund two — with numbers she cannot yet trust.
Dataset: A realistic public mandate dataset: program costs, outcome proxies, administrative data quality and political commitments.
Your task: Audit the evidence, build the delivery and fiscal view, and decide the portfolio with a defensible brief.
A mandate diagnosis and a defended portfolio decision.
Data → Analysis → Decision, not Data → Code → Certificate
Day 10 · The Capstone
What will you change when you return to work?
Build the design and evaluation framework for your institution's flagship program: evidence base, causal chain, measurement, and delivery governance.
Methodology
Frameworks you will master
- • IPAT Strategic Execution Framework™
- • IPAT Executive Capability Model™
- • IPAT Data-to-Decision Framework™
- • Delivery architecture and deliverology lineage
- • PEFA-aligned fiscal disciplines
- • Political-economy analysis for public leaders
The Faculty Standard
Practitioners who have done the work
Every session is led by practitioner-faculty: PhDs, former central bankers, serving and former CFOs, and delivery leaders who have built and run the systems they teach. Cases are drawn from institutions they have advised, not textbook extracts. Faculty teach what they have decided with, under the same pressure you face.
Meet the IPAT facultyCareer Outcomes
Where this program takes you
Salary bands reflect 2025–26 market benchmarking across African markets plus global mobility ranges.
Cohorts
Upcoming cohorts
New dates are being scheduled
Register with your preferred start date and our admissions team will match you to the next available cohort — or contact us to arrange an in-house delivery for your organisation.
Register your interestExplore further
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