The world is (slowly) moving toward a shared understanding of the term “program”. There are still widely varying interpretations of project vs program but the most common themes are that programs typically drive significant strategic change, involve the integration and coordination of multiple component projects (and sometimes non-project work too), and focus on outcomes rather than outputs.

Alignment and Integration

Where all these criteria are fulfilled, major problems arise when the program is treated simply as a large project, meaning that planning and oversight is overly tactical to the detriment of the more strategic activity necessary for program success (see Big Programs, Basic Flaws).

Seven Key Elements

Ensuring the program delivers what was intended requires special emphasis given to areas such as strategic alignment, stakeholder management, scope and schedule integration, and benefits planning.

The following major elements of program management help provide appropriate focus:

1 – Business Case

Programs should have a well-articulated justification for the investment, that centers on the estimated costs of implementation and ongoing operations against the anticipated benefits to be gained and offset by the associated risks.  The business case lays out the strategic context of the program and shapes its overall mission and vision. Once approved, the business case provides a point of reference throughout the program (updated as necessary) in order to ensure a continued business rationale for the initiative.

2 – Program Organization

This should comprise a single program manager with unambiguous reporting lines to an executive steering committee (program board) that adequately reflects major stakeholder interests, budgetary control and resourcing. Other advisory committees may be set up to review and guide specific aspects of the program but the board always has ultimate decision-making authority. The program manager should have ready access to an individual program sponsor to resolve issues and obtain guidance not requiring involvement of the other board members.

3 – Stakeholder Alignment

The sheer scale of a program will usually infer involvement of many parties with vested interests. Stakeholder analysis will help to identify individual concerns and parties needing the greatest attention, and subsequently define appropriate response strategies. It also assists in identifying risks associated with (real or perceived) negative outcomes. Properly managing relationships with key stakeholders requires detailed communication plans and, (sometimes forgotten), ensuring adequate time and effort is expended in acting on those plans.

4 – Benefits Realization Plan

Since programs focus on outcomes (vs. projects which focus on outputs), a core element of program setup is the development of a plan that (a) assigns metrics to identified benefits, (b) forecasts when and how those benefits will be realized and (c) maps program deliverables to the benefits which are in turn linked to program objectives. This helps ensure that assumptions in how each benefit will be realized are validated and that all required deliverables are clearly identified.

5 – Program Architecture

The program architecture identifies component projects and the major interfaces between them. A vital aspect of developing the architecture is scope integration, whereby the boundaries of each component are validated to ensure that program objectives can be fulfilled without gaps or overlapping effort among the constituent projects. A high-level program roadmap is an important tool in depicting anticipated sequencing of the projects, target dates for key interfaces, review/approval gates and other milestones, and successive stages of funding.

6 – Integrated Master Schedule

An effective integrated master schedule (IMS) consolidates all component project schedules and links them at the task level with specific, clearly defined interfaces with explicit completion criteria. Depending on the schedule criticality, the use of simulation tools and optimization techniques are often essential tools to properly manage schedule risk and greatly increase credibility of the plan and confidence.  The IMS re-validates the program roadmap and benefits plan and together with an interface tracking log will therefore provide the basis for much of the program manager’s performance monitoring focus during program execution.

7 – Tiered Governance

While project managers within the program will typically track progress against schedule, cost and technical performance, the program manager needs to ensure not only proper roll-up of this data (possibly via a program office) to control overall program progress but also to implement tracking of benefit metrics, as per the benefits realization plan. A well-designed program dashboard reflects both types of metric to provide the board with a holistic view of both the strategic and tactical performance aspects of the program.

How you start determines how you finish

Time is sometimes lost at project startup with lots of talk but not much action (the “fuzzy front end”). Contrast this with the intensity of effort expended by the team near the end of the project – rushing to meet a looming deadline – and the need for some up-front structure and focus becomes clear.

Each project manager may have their own take on this, (and the actual first steps will be somewhat dependent on the particular situation) but these six should be at the front end of any list:

1 – Read the Business Case

If it doesn’t exist, get one done. There’s no point embarking on a project if the rationale for WHY we’re doing the project and WHO it’s for hasn’t been clearly laid out and signed off. If it does exist, identify who developed it, who was consulted and who approved it. Lastly, is it still current? Has anything changed in the environment that might affect realization of the anticipated benefits?

2 – Identify the Key Stakeholders

Who benefits from the project? Who can influence the outcomes and who might be impacted by them? The business case should be a guide but performing a thorough stakeholder analysis is essential before the next step is finished. Identify the project sponsor and set up an early “mind-meld” meeting to establish Sponsor-PM rapport (see Eight Questions to Ask Your Sponsor).

3 – Determine the Requirements

What does the customer actually need? What do other key stakeholders want? What has to be delivered in order to achieve the target benefits? Detailed requirements gathering and analysis may need to occur later as part of the project scope but the high-level needs at least should be established here. Determine what constraints will influence how the requirements might be met – these will impact project scope, quality, schedule, costs and resources.

4 – Identify Similar Projects

Has anything similar been done before? If so, what lessons were learned from that project (see Three Agenda Items for a Lessons Learned Review). Is there anything similar, or somehow related, going on currently? If yes, might there be potential overlap or dependencies? Can any artifacts from similar projects (e.g. plans, actuals, risk data) be re-used?

5 – Identify the Core Team Members

Which functions need to be involved to define and generate the project deliverables? Who specifically should represent those functions in the project? Who do you need on board to help generate a complete, reliable plan? Who should oversee the various workstreams? Limit the core team to no more than 8 people to promote efficient meetings and decision making.

6 – Create a Project Objective Statement

WHAT will be done, by WHEN and for HOW MUCH? The project should have a concise, over-arching declaration of intent (see The Project Objective Statement). Doing this (ideally as the first activity involving the core team) quickly shifts the focus away from the strategic (business case) and onto the tactical aspects of the project; it also helps to highlight potential issues early on, and ensures high level clarity and alignment as a precursor to elaborating the details of the project plan. Validate the POS with the Sponsor.

Begin with the End in Mind

The step numbering here indicates only the general flow – it is not a prescriptive project startup sequence as oftentimes a degree of iteration will occur among the six before they can all be checked off as ‘done’. These first steps neatly embody the adage “Begin with the end in mind” and initiate a response to the Five Laws (see The Five Laws of Effective Project Management).

Much more than a Memory Jogger

Among all the tools at our disposal for managing projects, programs and portfolios, checklists are perhaps the simplest and most productive means of building consistency in work practices. Checklists are useful in almost every field of human endeavor, and in particular where repeatability and systematic action drive performance. Yet they are still much under-used in the planning and managing of projects.

As a good friend of mine, Nick Gogerty, recently posted in Checklists, hedge funds and human behaviour, checklists provide for better outcomes – both individual and team. And the more collective experience that goes into the creation of a checklist, the more value it will have. Well thought-out checklists are indispensable wherever there is a need for control, risk reduction, rapid response or safety – as doctors, flight crew, investors and others the world over can testify, the checklist provides efficient guidance, increased confidence and focus under stress (see The Checklist Manifesto – How to Get things Right - a great-sounding read that Nick highly recommends).

Twelve Checks for Planning

Likewise for project managers – checklists can be used for all manner of things. Where training builds knowledge, checklists facilitate application.  Here is a high level twelve-point checklist for use during project planning:

1. Have the needs and concerns of all key stakeholders been considered and resolved?
2. Does the project have an overall approved mission statement defining the scope, schedule and resources/budget?
3. Has the relative flexibility among scope, schedule, resources and budget been determined?
4. Have all project deliverables been identified and described in detail with unambiguous completion criteria?
5. Are roles and responsibilities defined and agreed upon for all project team members?
6. Has an appropriately detailed work breakdown structure been created with input from key team members?
7. Has a credible schedule with identifiable critical path and late schedule been developed from the WBS and optimized within the project constraints?
8. Have milestones been included in the schedule to track major events, completed phases and/or deliverables and external dependencies?
9. Have workload commitments been identified for each week of the project and agreed to by team members and their managers?
10. Have response plans been developed for the most significant threats to project success?
11. Has a change management process been defined and agreed to by all key stakeholders?
12. Has the governance structure for the project been established with an agreed sponsorship role and expectations set for review frequency and format?

One of the features of checklists is that they can be designed to extend hierarchically, such that a sub-checklist could be developed to facilitate any or all of the checks above (e.g. a stakeholder analysis checklist or a risk management checklist). The PMI, training firms and PMOs would do well to promote checklists more strongly – project managers like to use checklists; not many want to read through an overweight methodology. And managers like checklists because they improve quality and instill consistency. For the converted, I’ll have more checklists in future posts.

The Whole is the Sum of its Parts

Project scope is most frequently described in a narrative format, often termed a scope statement. While this may convey a broad sense of what the project will set out to accomplish, a narrative alone runs the risk of being at best insufficiently detailed and at worst ‘fluffy’ and incomplete with all the inherent dangers of ambiguity (see Ambiguity Kills Projects).

3 Steps to Clarify Scope

An effective definition of scope needs to include a formal description of the project deliverables. These are the primary outputs that result from the work performed – what will be there at the end of the project that is not there at the beginning. There are three steps to describing the deliverables completely:

1 – Identify the Major Deliverables
What are the largest, most significant outputs of the project?
These are the major deliverables, that when combined, should comprise ALL delivered outputs and reflect the full scope of the project. Since deliverables are “things” they should have noun or noun/adjective titles, e.g:

Release-Ready Software  |  Prototype Hardware  |  Trained Staff  |  Assessment Report etc.
– they are not activities with verbs (those will be defined later in the WBS).

2 – Describe Deliverable Features and Exclusions
What exactly will be delivered? What will not be included?
The Is/Is Not technique is the best way to define deliverable boundaries, by capturing the attributes that a deliverable “is” (or includes) and those that it “is not” (or does not include); e.g. for a deliverable “Business Model Analysis Report” we might have:

IS – Current marketing assessment, Competitor analysis, Customer needs study, etc.
IS NOT – Plan for an alternative business model, Supplier capability study, etc.

3 – Define Deliverable Completion Criteria
How will you know when the deliverable is finished?
These criteria are crucially important (see Completion Criteria ensure Done means Done); aligning expectations up front among customer, stakeholders and team will avoid painful conflict later in the project. For example:

- Six copies of report in spiral-bound hardcopy provided to Steering Committee for review
- Key findings presented in PPT format to Executive Management in a half-hour briefing.

Bridging the Gap between SOW and WBS

Deliverable descriptions make for sound scope management and effective change control. They exploit and enhance the Statement of Work narrative to provide real benefit in several ways:

• Give the project scope some solid structure
• Align expectations among stakeholders
• Establish the basis for customer validation of outputs
• Bridge the gap between the initial scope narrative and the detailed WBS
• Help ensure that all WBS tasks are comprehensively identified (e.g. completion criteria will often point to needed WBS activities).

Undefined deliverables => unclear scope => undeliverable project.