Managing the Program: The Importance of Lifecycle Management

Joe Wynne is a versatile Project Manager experienced in delivering medium-scope projects in large organizations that improve workforce performance and business processes. He has a proven track record of delivering effective, technology-savvy solutions in a variety of industries and a unique combination of strengths in both process management and workforce management.

  Program Management  

If you are new to the concept of program management, understand that a program is the bundling of projects together that are related by benefits desired. This pair of articles will use the example of projects bundled to enable a new product to be delivered.

Part 1 will not define the actual projects yet, but it is easy to see that none of the eventual projects make sense on their own. (Why would you need a new web self-service area without the vendor application or workers to sell the product?) The benefits desired for the business only accrue from the completion of the entire bundle. That makes this set of projects an easily identifiable program.

But a program for a particular organization may be also be defined as:

• A series of small enhancement projects upgrading and updating a production application, all of which would be necessary to achieve a set of improved values productivity metrics, or…
• A group of hardware replacements organized into separate overlapping and interdependent projects intended to reduce overall technology costs by a certain amount.

The Importance of Lifecycle Management
For a program manager, lifecycle management is an important area of expertise that must be applied early. Multiple projects within a program increase the complexity of lifecycle issues greatly as compared with a single project. In addition, the …

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