Anatomy of an Effective Program Manager

Gary Hamilton is a PgMP credentialed Program Manager with over 18 years of program management experience primarily in financial services and business transformation. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Plattsville teaching in the Program Management curriculum since 2013. He resides in North Carolina with his wife and when not working he is an avid hiker/runner.

  Career Development   Governance   Leadership   Organizational Project Management  

Within many organizations, the discipline of program management is fairly new. In others, there is a struggle to draw the lines of demarcation between project and program management, and therefore the differences between the roles of project manager and program manager are not clearly defined.

Making these distinctions is crucial; although projects and programs function interdependently within an organization, approaches for managing them diverge from one another. Projects are largely autonomous and each has an end goal, the outcome of which does not have a significant influence on other organizational activities.

In contrast, programs fall into the realm of the “big picture” and involve “interrelated projects that somehow have to work in a collaborative way to realize a positive and common outcome.”[1] Program managers, rather than working within a relatively insular project team, must deal with clients and other stakeholders, which requires them to be skilled in the areas of strategy definition, communications and management of those stakeholders. And, almost counterintuitively, program managers must avoid becoming overly involved at the micro level, a distraction that could cause them to lose sight of broader, organization-level goals.

All of that being the case, what qualities define an exceptional program manager? In relatively immature …

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