Making Programs Work: Straighten Up and Fly Right
Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.
Making programs work is a challenge. They are large. They are complex. They are uncertain. They are fraught with risk. And they have an awfully large number of moving parts to them.
The evolution of program management largely parallels that of project management. In actual fact, their histories are arguably one and the same. Modern project management is typically attributed to large-scale industrial maintenance and turnaround efforts at Dupont, and the development of the Polaris nuclear missile submarine platform, both dating back to the mid-1950s. These efforts gave us, respectively, the techniques of CPM and PERT.
That last one in particular is telling: the acronym stands for “Program Evaluation and Review Technique”. And in reality, the size and scope of what Dupont and Polaris involved were as large, if not larger, as any comparable program today. The management of programs and projects have evolved in parallel, with a relatively intuitive understanding of what differentiates the work of managing a program from that of a project.
That distinction got more formalized in 2006, when PMI published the first standards for both program management and portfolio management. And yet, if you go back to this early development of program management, a lot of what was defined was as--if not more--relevant to the practice of portfolio management. In fact, if I …
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Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. - Jerry Seinfeld |
