Program Management Versus Project Management?

 

There’s a lot of confusion out there about the precise nature of program management, as opposed to project management, so I’ll go ahead and weigh in, leading, I’m sure, to either immediate clarification or hopeless obfuscation.

According to Wikipedia, “program management” is the

process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance. It is distinct from project management.[i]

Clearly an aspect of scalability is in play here, and I believe it goes all the way down to the smallest component of project management, the Work Package.

Quick refresher – the Work Package (WP) is the lowest point of the project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that has estimates (baselines) for cost, schedule, and scope and, depending on their size, will typically have a manager assigned to them, or at least one person responsible for its performance.

Work Packages are combined to form Control Accounts, which also will typically have a manager assigned. Control Accounts combine to the total project level where, again, one person is typically responsible for the overall project’s performance.

Now this scalability gets a little dicey. As long as we’re managing a specific set of scope objectives, management is safe in assuming that all of the information they need to maximize their odds of on-time, on-schedule scope completion can be generated by the earned value and critical path-based information streams. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, past the members of the PM’s own project team, she really doesn’t care about the performance of the rest of the organization. But once we start talking about a combination of projects that share a common “goal or result,” then the basis for collecting the programmatic work into a given category becomes both more broad and less cohesive, and acquires the expectation that the resources belonging to the organization must now be taken into account in a way they hadn’t been previously. An upholsterer and a machinist may both be working on different car models (projects) within the same factory (program), but that does not automatically translate to a demonstrable need to manage their efforts using previously unknown techniques under the rubric of “doing” program management.

Let’s go ahead and perform a little mental exercise, where we leap-frog from techniques clearly belonging to project management, jumping over program management, and arrive at the techniques belonging to portfolio, or enterprise management. To provide the information necessary for maxxing-out the odds of successfully managing the overall portfolio or enterprise, three management information systems (MISs) must be in place: Asset Management (the General Ledger), Project Management (Earned Value and Critical Path systems that cover all of the project work), and Strategic Management (a system that analyzes the macro-organization’s proposal and contract backlog, along with data on market share/competitors). As I discuss in my latest book, these information streams, and the concerns they represent, must be balanced in order to, again, maximize the odds of success.

Now, let’s turn around and consider the category of program management, sitting, as it does, on the tier between project and enterprise management. I believe that program management is simply up-scaled project management, and should confine its information requirements to earned value and critical path across all the conjoined projects. I also think that when assertions are made to the contrary, such as the so-called need for accommodating the asset managers’/accountants’ input on how these programs should be run, such assertions do nothing more than muddy the epistemological waters, thereby granting importance and emphasis to people and information streams that do not deserve them, at least not at this level of management.

Okay, so now I’ve staked out program management’s theoretical boundaries. Next, I’ll review the hucksters (strikethrough) purveyors of business techniques and strategies who need to be excluded from the program management discussion they have so crassly crashed.