Studying what you're doing professionally

Although I left full time education without a degree, I've been pretty successful in my IT career, and have sought out both less formal qualifiations (such as Brainbench certification) and professional certification (Microsoft). However, now I'm working at a company where a high proportion of the staff are PhDs or at least MScs, I'm noticing the lack of academic qualification more.
So I'm now studying towards the BCS exams to get a recognised honours-degree equivalent qualification with a view to then doing a Masters following on from that. The thing is, I can see more point in various of the subjects now I've got a substantial amount of experience profesionally, whereas when I was studying at university, some of it seemed a bit far removed from what would be immediately useful at work (that said the course focussed on Cognitive Science initially and so had a lot of stuff like linguistics and psychology so it could have been partly the choice of course).
I'm happy to see that systems analysis seems to have moved away from SSADM and has embraced UML a lot more. I've obviously done various bits of analysis over the years, designing my programs and producing technical specifications and so on, but there's still new ground here and a formalising of various processes. On the other hand, I can't say I've worked anywhere that the scale of analysis that they consider the norm is used - 6 month analysis plans is would in many cases have been longer than the entire project implementation.
Still, looking through the rest of the syllabus, the majority of the remaining modules are ones which match more fully with my existing experience. I'm left wondering just how much of the entire course I could pass without additional study. I've estimated on needing a couple of weeks to finish the systems analysis study, and a few weeks for another course (where I'll know the technical and general business issues but not necessarily all the specific legal ones), but looking at the past questions and examiners reports it looks like most of the other modules (such as database systems, advanced database systems, object oriented programming, web programming, etc) I should be able to do with just my current knowledge.
I had been planning to do the Certificate in IT this September, the Diploma in IT next April, and the remaining modules and project for the full honours degree equivalent (Professional Graduate Diploma in IT) over the following year. Now I'm wondering whether I should be doing either the Certificate and Diploma exams this September, and see how I fare for doing the remaining modules either the following April or split between that and the following September, or whether I should be really ambitious and try to do all 13 modules for the whole course in one sitting (more than a week just doing exams!). I think most people would consider that really ambitious, especially considering full-time work commitments and time demands from family, but if I could do that then it would pretty well prove that a decent amount of serious professional experience (and ongoing self-study) is a substitute for a degree, and I could then look towards studying towards a Masters...
Anyway, I think I'll finish the study for the current modules and see how I'm doing for time then look through some more of the past papers and examiners reports, and try to come to a decision as to whether I'm effectively going to dedicate the entirety of my free time to study for the next 6 months or not.
One other question would be whether I could swing an arrangement with my employer to be able to do a project for the with permission to send a copy of the code, etc, to be marked for the final project, which would then allow me to use a little bit of my own time to reward my employer for the use of the code for that, while allowing me to do most of the project work as paid development time...