Program Management
is the directing of a portfolio of projects, which
benefit from a consolidated approach. Program management
is co-ordinated management of a portfolio of projects
that change organisations to achieve benefits that
are of strategic importance.
At the top of the enterprise scheduling hierarchy,
is the Program Management layer. At this layer,
senior management is coordinating and establishing
the overall program goals and objectives. On a
practical level, this typically translates into
resource skill and funding management. Program
Management users are primarily concerned with
the key project milestones, dependencies between
projects, and summary activities, across all projects
with the desire to understand what skills are
needed for the program to succeed.
Program milestones typically correlate to funding
obligations and/or work authorizations. When a
project schedule is first created, the project
milestone reflects an agreed upon set of target
dates which are used to evaluate the progress
of a project and to plan the funding obligations.
When a project milestone slips or is projected
to slip, the Program engagement team needs to
know on a timely basis, and needs information
to help them assess the impact of a slippage.
Interface points represent critical interfaces
between projects. In the case where one project
must provide some information or product to another
project, there must be a cross project interface.
By centralizing these interfaces, the program
management team accomplishes two objectives. First,
it focuses visibility on these critical scheduling
items. Second, it provides a single channel or
data source for all integration points for all
organizations. This streamlines updates between
the various multiple project organizations.
Summary activities allow the Program Level to
retain some visibility into the detail project
schedules without getting bogged down in the details.
This is usually required to maintain credibility
for the detail schedule updates being reported
by the various project managers.
Our Program Management Methodology
consists of following Phases:
