Deficiencies with programme management?
Executive Summary
Having raised the question in a earlier post of why billions of dollars invested in projects were not resulting in the realisation of strategic benefits, and then exploring portfolio management, this post explores whether programme management may play a part.
It appears programme management is indeed the vital link but may be deficient in two critical areas:
- Current conceptions of programme management are often immature and inconsistent.
- Current guidelines may not be flexible enough to support strategy.
- The level of certainty that exists with strategy is far less than programme managers have traditionally assumed.
- It is not optimal to work on the basis that top managers set strategy and programme managers implement strategy.
- Programme management must adapt to the context within which it operates. This flexibility of practice is important to:
- support some level of challenging, feedback and dialogue on strategy, and
- easily redefine the program as new information comes to hand.
this post is an extract from an academic paper prepared for the IT Project Management SIG meeting at the2009 International Conference for Information Systems
Making Sense of Program Management
Programme management in contrast to project or portfolio management is not a mature discipline. There are less than a dozen textbooks and almost all of them start by commenting on the dearth of available guidance. This situation may have arisen because the origins of program management were in the US aerospace and defence industries where it was kept secret for decades. It was only in the 1980s as people moved did program management take hold in the commercial sector but even then it was sometimes only the term being misapplied to the management of large or multiple projects [1]. The US understanding is probably best captured by the Project Management Institute’s recently published Standard for Program Management with its focus on new product development. However, the UK’s Office of Government Commerce’s developed Managing Successful Programmes in the late 1990s to focus on the delivery of change and has begun to dominate the way programme management is being understood internationally [2].
However, there remains however considerable confusion [3]. Some successful project managers have been promoted into programme roles only to flounder [2]. It was an important clarification to find that project management and program management had different theoretical foundations and that programmes could not be treated as scale-ups of projects [4]. It was found that project management had been applied successfully mainly in the domain of new product development. Program management was characterised more as a tool for strategy implementation in domains that included manufacturing, quality, organisational change, change in work and industry and product development [5]. It is not well understood that programme management competence relates more to general management skills and generic leadership qualities than to project management skills [6].
Deficiencies with implementing strategy
A problem has arisen because strategy is becoming more complex and is increasingly less about the technical skills to develop new products and more about the leadership skills to introduce organisational changes to react to rapidly changing environments. A strategy may sometimes require development of new products and services but to be effective the strategy will still require organisational change to develop the capacity to deliver new services [7]. We are starting to realise that the programme management practices that we have inherited are not particular supportive of strategic thinking and are inadequate for strategy implementation.
Programme management practice has yet to reflect the insights from thirty years of experience with strategic planning. Strategic planning has been found to be fundamentally different to strategic thinking [8]. The WW1 battle of Passchendaele is an example of how a strategically desirable option was found to be tactically impossible. After four months and the loss of over a quarter of a million lives, the generals eventually found they were sending their men through a sea of impassable mud. This particular failure was inexcusable, because the map is not the reality and the general should have seen for himself. However, corporate leaders do not have this option because they are not dealing with a physical environment that can be inspected but a future environment which cannot. It is necessary for a strategy to be informed by the results of a strategic plan. A chosen strategy must be tested on an ongoing basis, whether it is working as expected, or whether an alternative strategy is a better option. The level of certainty that exists with strategy is less than the practitioners of strategic planning and programme managers have traditionally assumed. It is not appropriate to work on the basis that top managers set a strategy and programme manager implement the strategy. There must be some level of questioning, feedback and dialogue.
Deficiencies with programme management
This insight is rarely if ever reflected in practice. Mainstream programme management is strongly influenced by the project management tradition and programme management practices may have been codified too rigidly. Practice tends to be programme-centric and a clear boundary between the project and business domains is maintained [9]. Guidelines suggest a level of documentation rigour that works as a disincentive to challenging and redefining the program as new information comes to hand and the guideline underemphasise the need to adapt to the context in which a programme operates [2]. Responsibility for the realisation of benefits is often assigned to business managers outside a narrowly defined programme [10]. One major text provides an example of a program to develop a new product independent of another program to market the product without emphasising the need to coordinate decisions to realise a strategic goals such as profitably entering a new market [1]. When organisations view programmes in this way, they tend to shoe-horn programmes into project-level thinking, fail to focus adequately on building and maintaining support for the strategic programme goals and lose most of the benefits sought in setting up programmes in the first place [11][2]
Effective programme managers have been shown to frequently adapt the formal guidelines in subtle and creative ways, or ignore or contradict them completely. Arguably the common guidelines were found by them to either be not useful or not make sense. They seek more to engage stakeholders than to manage them as the methodologies might suggest. The current codification into a common set of transferable principles and processes appears to be inadequate and some even question whether it is possible [2].
Conclusion
The conclusion is that programme management is far from uniform and is immature as a discipline. It is as much about coping as it is about planning and rational decision making, as much about re-shaping the organisational landscape as it is about delivering new capabilities. There is the suggestion that the tendency towards prescription based on ‘one size with minor variations’ approach may warrant re-examination [2]. These insights may explain why programme management concepts have not had more influence or lead to the realisation of more strategic benefits within the Victorian public sector or beyond. This would appear to be a crucial deficiency that justifies further work. It does not seem acceptable to allow governments or corporations to continue to invest tens of billions of dollars and not realise the strategic benefits that we expect of them. This finding seems particularly important in the context of the massive fiscal stimuli being funded by governments around the world to counter the GFC.
References
[1] D.Z. Millosevic, R. Martinelli, and J.M. Wadell, Program Management for Improved Business Results, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
[2] S. Pellegrinelli, D. Partington, C. Hemingway, Z. Mohdzain, and M. Shah, “The importance of context in programme management: An empirical review of programme practices,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 25, 2007, pp. 41 – 55.
[3] A. Stretton, “Program Management Diversity – Opportunity or Problem?,” PM World Today, vol. 11, Jun. 2009.
[4] M. Lycett, A. Rassau, and J. Danson, “Programme management: a critical review,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 22, 2004, pp. 289 – 299.
[5] K. Artto, M. Martinsuo, H.G. Gemünden, and J. Murtoaro, “Foundations of program management: A bibliometric view,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 27, 2009, pp. 1 – 18.
[6] D. Partington, S. Pellegrinelli, and M. Young, “Attributes and levels of programme management competence: an interpretive study,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 23, 2005, pp. 87 – 95.
[7] D. Williams and T. Parr, Enterprise Programme Management: Delivering Value, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
[8] H. Mintzberg, “The fall and rise of strategic planning,” Harvard Business Review, vol. Jan-Feb, 1994.
[9] M. Thiry and M. Deguire, “Recent developments in project-based organisations,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 25, 2007, pp. 649 – 658.
[10] CCTA, Managing Successful Programmes, London: Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (now called OGC), 2000.
[11] S. Pellegrinelli, “Programme management: organising project-based change,” International Journal of Project Management, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 141 – 149.