On Program Management: Beyond Delivery

Eric Norman is a skilled management consultant and leader with extensive business process design experience supporting a broad array of industries. Over the past 25 years, he has specialized in program management - mentoring, consulting and leading project, program and business process improvement efforts.

  Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

From time to time, I’ll be writing thoughts on program management. To be accurate, I won’t actually limit my posts to program management exclusively, but will include thoughts and comments about related domains such as project or portfolio management, leadership, business change management, perhaps others. I’ll try to make the articles interesting and maybe a little challenging. Whatever the case, I hope you’ll enjoy them.

I’m calling this first discussion “Beyond Delivery.” Here I’ll be sharing thoughts about how projects and programs are often delivered—focusing on some considerations for improving outcomes—and I’ll be commenting about what we, as leaders who oversee organizational initiatives, can do to be more effective. Here we go…

Thinking back on both the successes and disappointments I’ve experienced in my career as a practitioner, the recollections that surface most often are not the successes or even the challenged programs I’ve led. Most concerning to me is the discovery, after the fact, that some initiative I had successfully delivered had either been only a temporary fix, or when viewed later was revealed to be failure masquerading as success—to be discovered for what it was only after the passage of time.

Let me briefly explain. The challenged projects and programs …

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