Is There a Future in Program Management?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development   PMO   Program Management  

What’s a program manager? Simple question, right? Depending on which definition you prefer (or which version of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) you studied, you’ll likely view a program as a group of related projects that will benefit from some kind of collective management. You’ll recognize that not all of those projects are likely to be underway at the same time, and that a program may change and evolve quite considerably over a period of several years before it’s completed.

So, technically, a program manager is the person who manages that program. The person who collaborates with the project managers, sponsors and customer representatives to ensure that the high-level, overarching initiative remains on track even as the various projects start, finish, change and move forward.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that, and it’s getting more complicated. If you want to have a career that includes program management, you need to understand what has happened to the role—and what is likely to happen.

Program managers today
I’m not sure there really is a standard for what constitutes a program manager in many organizations today. I know of a number of organizations that have eliminated the role entirely. They view it as unnecessary in an environment of enhanced collaboration because …

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