Welcome to the new SBDi Program Management Tips. These helpful tips concentrate on management topics for large-scale, multi-divisional projects. You can register to receive both the Program Manager's Tips and the original Requirements Engineer's Tips in your email by clicking here.

Program Management pertains to managing mission critical projects involving a number of groups/divisions within a corporation or between business partnerships. This translates into the management of multiple projects - with multiple iterations - across multiple divisional and corporate boundaries. A different "project" manager probably manages each key deliverable of the "program". For example, a deliverable can be an advertising campaign, marketing strategy, and different software and hardware components. Each of these deliverables may also have individual coordinated deliverables. For example, the software will have a requirements specification, design document, code, data structure, and so forth. A program manager oversees, coordinates, and directs the completion and ensures the quality of each deliverable including the dependencies between all the deliverables.

What It Isn't
Many confuse the role of Program Management with the project management office function. On the contrary, the project management office is a tool for the Program Manager. This group follows progress and tracks issues (and their resolution) and reports the information to the Program Manager and the executive management committee. In many cases, this valuable project group reports directly to the Program Manager. The program manager manages the program and is accountable for its success as well as being responsible for avoiding the identified risks.

When Is Program Management Required?
How important is this program to the corporation? Look at the following questions. If you answer "yes" to any of them, you probably should set the strategy for program manager control.

• Is the final product a significant customer offering?
• Does it involve coordination outside corporate boundaries?
• Is it one of the top five projects for the company?
• Will it take more than six months to implement?
• Is an outside organization auditing the effort?
• Is there a high risk to the corporation if the program fails?
• Are multiple business units involved (three or more)?
• Are multiple project teams involved (three or more)?

Who Should be Selected for the Role of Program Manager
A Program Manager is a senior manager with a minimum of ten years of management experience. This experience must involve coordination of multiple business units across multiple organizations. It is more important that the chosen program manager have experience in implementing a quality product, on time and within budget than having the business domain knowledge. Information technology has become a critical component of any business solution. For this reason, we recommend that the program manager have some experience in IT development. This person could come from the information technology organization but is most commonly from the business side with experience in implementing a project using information technology. Depending on the financial impact of this product, the program manager can be from the financial community. This is rare, as they prefer to be on the outside looking in as an overseer of the financial interest of the company. This person must be a person that builds consensus among a varying group of individuals with their own self-interests. They must be a strong leader, quick decision maker, and respected by both the executive committee and the reporting staff.

Responsibilities & Accountability
The program manager is accountable for the quality of the end product and all the deliverables in between. They are responsible for ensuring that the product is built on time and within budget. They are responsible for keeping the business interests of the corporation as the highest priority. To accomplish this, they must provide continual feedback to the executive management team consisting of the CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, and CTO. The program manager must continually review the status and suggest the unpopular decision to cut their losses and end the program! They must be attuned to the tolerance level of the executive committee as business priorities change. They must communicate the change to all those involved while minimizing the product and program risk.

In another tip we will discuss the organizational issues of the Program Manager.

SBDi has experienced Program Managers on staff to help you with your large-scale mission-critical products. We can assist your organization in setting the strategy for managing these large critical efforts or help manage them.

Pat Ferdinandi