Program design could be used to improve the management of projects. Program design sets initial conditions for the program and for each project of the program and ensures the highest likelihood of achieving the business outcomes.
Initial Condition Premise
Final results are a function of initial conditions. Attempts to manage, direct, and control tasks to change the outcome once the initial conditions are set will be inefficient and ineffective.
Why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Why are there so few short basketball players? How different would your life likely have been if you had been born in some third world country, or if you had been born under very different economic conditions?
My parents moved here from Italy in the 1950’s. I think they would have made great Program Managers because they understood the Initial Condition premise. Their number one priority for their children was “Get an education so that you can have a different starting point.” Virtually all immigrants from that period understood that. That’s why so many of their children completed university. They understood that no amount of hard work (task management) could overcome a poor start. Of course, we still have to work hard and smart, but the smartest thing is a better start.
The focus of the project manager and project management has been more with controlling execution (task control). The end result is that project management, at least in the technology sector, seems to be stuck at a success rate of about 30%. And this rate has budged very little in the last decade or two. As hard as project managers may work, they cannot seem to budge this number.
Can this number be significantly improved? I believe it can. We should be able to get it over 50% relatively easily, and certainly with no additional cost. We just need a little shift in focus. We need to give the project manager a little help. We need to set projects up for success by design. And systematic Program Design is the way to do that.
The PMI Global Standard “The Standard for Program Management” (Program Management Institute 2006, page 4) specifies: “A program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits and control not available from managing them individually.” The standard also goes on to say that the focus of a program is on benefits, whereas the focus of a project is to deliver a product, service, or capability. And benefits typically flow after the project is completed and not during its execution. Let’s propose an alternative, yet complimentary, definition.
A program is an initiative whose purpose is to deliver a set of specific and measurable outcomes to the organization. A program will require one or more projects and ongoing processes to deliver those outcomes.
Programs are often assembled from existing projects by evaluating their degree of inter-relatedness. This is a way to improve the management of projects. This is a bottom-up approach that begins with a pool of projects. The underlying assumption is that the pool already contains the appropriate projects.
An alternative use of programs is as vehicles for consistently and reliably managing the delivery of measurable outcomes. PMOs, in general, have focused their attention on getting project managers to adhere to standards and to meet certain levels of competence. This is a quality assurance and policing role. Although this may be necessary, it is not sufficient. PMOs can have a much greater impact if they devote some time and attention to Program Design and Outcome Authentication. We can define the key goal of Program Design as:
To set initial conditions for the program and for each project of the program to ensure the highest likelihood of achieving the business outcomes.
An enhanced role for the PMO can be to ensure that when a project is officially launched and handed over to a project manager, the project begins under optimal conditions, not challenging conditions. No project should ever be launched with controllable conditions at anything other than optimal.
The project charter for a project should not be a project output but rather a program output. It should be handed to the project manager as the mandate for the project. The project charter should explicitly state what the optimal conditions are, and should provide an evaluation of each. A project should not be launched unless the conditions are optimal as specified. Part of program management should be to periodically reevaluate these conditions.
Many projects fail not because they were poorly managed per se, but rather because they were destined to fail based on poor initial conditions. Lack of management support, insufficient user involvement, ever-expanding scope, poor resourcing, and other top project failures are sometimes due to poor project execution. More often they are due to poor program design and challenging initial conditions. Many of these failures can be avoided through Program Design.
Comments