Request for Issues / Concerns

Since part of the reason for this blog is to help our clients and prospective clients deal with some of the common, and not so common issues related to Program Management, I'm inviting you to send us your own program issues, questions and concerns, and I'll incorporate them into future blog posts.   It can be a macro issue that affects the program as a whole (such as software quality assurance), or a detail issue that only impacts one component.  Just comment on this blog post or email me directly, and I'll address it.  Don't wor

Program Management: Building Trust (with Project Teams)

While it is important for project managers and program managers to have trust and rapport, it is also important for the Program Manager to obtain the trust of the actual project teams.  In the end, as much as we try to avoid it, keeping a program on schedule often requires some level of heroics on the part of the project teams to deliver.  But these are the people who are the least likely to have any direct contact with the senior sponsors of the program, which means that they need a connection with you as the Program Manager to inspire them to work hard towards the vision of the program

Program Management: Building Trust (with the Steering Committee)

If a program manager is going to be effective, he needs the trust of the Steering Committee and the Executive Sponsor. That's because ultimately his authority derives from them, and without their trust and backing, his job would be extremely difficult. And in most cases, gaining the trust of the Steering Committee is relatively straightforward. The Committee is looking for the program manager to represent their interests on the project and deal with problems as they come up, so you can gain their trust by following simple steps like these:

Program Management: Building Trust (with Project Managers)

In the last post I talked about the need for a program manager to have trust from his/her project managers, because a program manager's ability to spot problems frequently depends on the data that his project managers are supplying him.  If they are not telling you about the problems in their component of the program, then you are unlikely to spot those problems on your own.  So it's important that your project managers feel comfortable enough with you to share the information about the problems as soon as they spot them, so that you can help them deal with them.   So how do you do that

Program Management: The Need for Trust

One of the biggest challenges for the Program Manager and one of the biggest necessities is to build trust with all the different members of the program that he / she interacts with. It's a challenge because the Program Manager is usually the one stuck in the middle of every problem, and it's a necessity because without it the Program Manager will never be able to get people to buy in to the resolution to the problem. Here are a few examples of where trust issues can impact the program. (In a followup posts, I'll talk about how you can build trust to avoid these problems)

Program Management: The Steering Committee

Having a proper steering committee is critical to keeping a program running smoothly.   That's because each component in the program is likely to have a different constituent group that has their own agenda / requirements.  And often, but not always, these requirements conflict or cause additional complexity for the program.  This is actually very normal and proper behavior, because it is their responsibility to make sure that their individual requirements are met.  But if the program is to function smoothly and meet its deadlines, then someone or some group needs to be able to take th

Integration Testing: Are you allocating enough resources/time?

As a program manager, something you'll need to give a lot of thought to at the beginning of the project is integration testing, both across the components that are in your program, and with other systems across your company. Most programs allocate a lot of time for functional testing of each component and relatively little time to integration testing under the assumption that things will go pretty smoothly.

Real Life Scenario: Requirements mismatch between components

Up until now, we've just been talking about general tools that can be used to help with program / project management. But today, I want to talk about a real life situation that occurred at one of our clients and is probably relatively common in large programs. In this case, the program consisted of 8 separate components that had various integration points. These points included XML messages and reports being exchanged between components to support an end to end flow.

Monitoring Your Program Health (Resources)

I find that monitoring project / program resources is one of the most useful exercises in program management and one that is rarely done as completely as it should be.  I say this because there are several types of resources that should be monitored and most PMs only monitor the first (or rather they document the first, instead of monitoring it, but we'll get into that later on)

Monitoring Your Program Health (Dependencies)

As a project / program manager, dependencies can be the hardest thing for you to keep track of / manage, because of all the things that you are responsible for, these are the ones that are most out of your control.   So you need to coordinate with other project / program managers on a regular basis to make sure that your dependencies on them are still on schedule or if they've slipped.  (In most cases, they'll have slipped, and if you aren't being vigilant yourself, no one will have remembered to tell you)