Program (management)

Program management or programme management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance. In practice and in its aims it is often closely related to systems engineering, industrial engineering, change management, and business transformation.

The program manager has oversight of the purpose and status of the projects in a program and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the program goals are met by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot be achieved at project level or by providing the project manager with a program perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have program impacts. In a program there is a need to identify and manage cross-project dependencies and often the project management office (PMO) may not have sufficient insight of the risk, issues, requirements, design or solution to be able to usefully manage these. The program manager may be well placed to provide this insight by actively seeking out such information from the project managers although in large and/or complex projects, a specific role may be required. However this insight arises, the program manager needs this in order to be comfortable that the overall program goals are achievable.

Many programs are concerned with delivering a capability to change. Only when that capability is transferred to the line management and utilized by the host organization will the benefits actually be delivered. On this view, a program team cannot, on their own, deliver benefits. Benefits can only be delivered through the utilization of a new capability.

Programs are normally designed to deliver the organisation's strategy or business transformation, such as an ambition to be the fourth biggest supermarket in a region by 2017 or reduce wastage by 5% in two year's time.

According to one source, "a Program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits and control NOT available from managing them individually. Programs may include elements of related work outside of the scope of the discrete projects in the program... Some projects within a program can deliver useful incremental benefits to the organization before the program itself has completed."

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