Project managers could learn a thing or two about program management from the relief and rehabilitation efforts that began in fall 2002 in post-war Iraq . What happened with the constantly changing reality on the ground, and huge funding coming in, was that disparate government agencies started off optimistically chartering reconstruction projects all across the country.

Working independently from each other in ‘classified environments’ (secrecy was preserved to prevent speculation about war plans), the people in charge soon found their expectations about a linear outcome to the war thwarted. With hundreds of contractors waiting to execute thousands of projects, the US military finally decided that their plans needed to be integrated into a single operational strategy. The lack of coordination made every decision taken by program managers there useless. That’s when they decided to establish the ORHA (Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance) and change their approach to solving problems in Iraq. The ORHA comprised interdependent efforts from multiple agencies focused on projects related to what they then called the three pillars:

•  Humanitarian assistance
•  Civil administration
•  Reconstruction

In an organizational context, you can view these pillars as programs or practices. A single program would constitute up to 2300 projects. Imagine the effort required to rebuild an entire nation. But systematic and integrated program management was the only solution to this dilemma.

Project managers working in the mundane corporate world often forget the larger efforts and developments happening behind project management. When a project is suddenly cancelled, we take it personally and tend to be discouraged, not seeing the changing nature of the project’s relevance to the larger stream of projects within the pipeline.

To work successfully with program managers, project managers should

• Learn to adapt: Learning is the key to adaptation. This means keeping an eye on changing business conditions and steering clear of conflicts where larger program stakes are involved.

• Establish a project culture: Program managers have direct organizational authority over establishing a project framework. Project managers can create the groundwork for a dynamic project management culture by aligning project goals with the organization’s strategic objectives. PMs can do this by being delivery and execution focused and convincing program managers about the health and viability of their projects.

• Provide good metrics: Projects that merely support cost-cutting measures will soon fall on the sidelines. Projects cannot be judged on internal criteria such as performance alone. Their potential ROIs need to be reported to stakeholders to be evaluated realistically against expectations. Having a consistent good record with customer satisfaction also counts.

• Support policy and processes: Project managers often fail to strategically absorb centralized process assets in their projects. This is a major point of conflict with program managers who are directly responsible for adherence to policies. But if current policy positions are counterproductive to project execution standards, PMs need to communicate with program managers to create a sustainable environment for their projects.

http://www.sigir.mil/reports/pdf/Lessons_Learned_March21.pdf

Program Management for nation building

As a citizen and as a business professional, it’s hard not to worry about the enormous development issues in this country. For me, it’s a challenge about thinking through the big picture. Here’s why you should be worried too: with the government spending over Rs.51,000 crore of taxpayer’s money on national projects, its time someone started asking the right questions:

• Where is the money going?
• How do we know if it’s doing any good?

The answers obviously lie in the realm of project monitoring whereby we get to review spending on projects and know if resources are achieving expected outcomes. Neelesh Mishra recently filed some important research in the Hindustan Times on the state of government projects and used rural development in Maharashtra as an case study for how money is allocated without outcomes being delivered. The essential facts are worth revisiting here:

• The same job or project is run by multiple agencies For example, road building projects are done under the Bharat Nirman project (for rural infrastructure), the prime minister’s rural roads project, the Members’ of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme; similar arrangements exist for state legislators and state-level road building programs.
• The monitoring budget constitutes a mere 0.4 percent of the total project spend. The international norm is 10-12 percent though international projects do tend to spend at least a minimum of 5-6 percent on project monitoring.
• The monitoring data that comes back is often questionable or unverifiable. Asset registers– lists of everything that exists under a project or department—are redundant in the annals of government bureaucracy. In spite of the fact that these are legally mandatory!

It’s good to know that our President, in her address to the parliament, has promised independent monitoring mechanisms at the district level. These will certainly help ensure transparency and public accountability. The question now is how these mechanisms are to be implemented and by whom.

The MBA Solution

The HT article puts forward the following recommendations:

• Build one sector (example road) into one program
• Build a common centralized monitoring cell with requisite office and hardware
• Hire MBAs as Program Officers working out of 566 rural districts + 11,000 smaller units
• Staff 12 data entry operators under each Officer equipped with necessary hardware
• Use of technology and creation of National Virtual Asset Registry using GPS and GIS technology

The author goes further in suggesting that

Each of the MBAs should have a staff of 12 data entry operators, all paid Rs 10,000 a month and equipped with either small point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones equipped with cameras.

Whereas I agree largely on the deployment of technology assets, I feel there are fundamental assumptions and issues here especially around an MBA’s capabilities to play this role.  The education currently provided to MBAs around the discipline of Project Management is absent in the academic curriculum.  Our outdated curriculums still look at the Project Management discipline as a scheduling and operational subject.
I have argued about this in my other postings. You can find them here and here.

Eye in the sky—looking through the PMO

At the organization level we need a Program Management Office with a primary role of monitoring and governance.   Moving to a Program Management approach would certainly yield the right results as opposed to merely managing multiple initiatives like a large project. The failure to understand of the difference between managing projects versus managing programs—along with related processes and tools—can lead to misunderstanding of both efforts and outcomes.
Furthermore, standardization of inputs to the monitoring process is required for an effective monitoring mechanism to work at the national level. So is plan development and coherent measures of success led by implementation of measurement plans. These will help enforce national standards around managing projects and help evolve solutions for developing standards around managing programs.

Of course, training and development of MBAs in the program management discipline will equip them to play the central role of Program officers. But picking up fresh MBAs who are under-equipped in the subject is equivalent to treating PM as a skill issue and not a management domain in itself.

The need of the hour is a new breed of project professionals and program officers willing to align and involve themselves with the rural community to establish the correct measures of social control at the grass-root level.
I cannot but restate my call for the awareness and recognition of Program management as a mandatory discipline for capacity building with MBAs as a starting point.

‘The visions and initiatives required for managing large business transformations are sorely lacking’, a senior IT manager confides with me. Other professionals managing multiple projects have also come to feel that an emerging discipline such as Program Management is being meaninglessly confused with the management of large projects.

Let me try to make it as clear as possible: Program Management is NOT simply an extension of traditional Project Management practices. These latter, though necessary, are not sufficient in the face of contemporary project challenges.

Today’s fast-paced customer environments are narrowly focused on providing transactional services and otherwise limited to delivering specific deliverables. I have encountered few project environments making real use of structured Program Management. With an emphasis on interdependency management, I believe, PgM can be used for more than a crisis management tool.

While most project managers may agree theoretically to what I have said above, there are few who would advocate the risk (and opportunities) of integrated Program Management to their sponsors. The problem is not with levels of knowledge or attitudes at the work place, the limitation is perhaps in the very speed of delivery that has become the only visible measure of efficiency for projects today. It’s a conundrum that deserves the project management community’s attention today.

The one aspect that gives program management an almost political edge is the practice of stakeholder management. In so far as politics is about the art of harvesting advantage based on faith in relationships past and present, stakeholder management is about managing perceptions about projects, beyond the actual outcomes or benefits of such projects.

Step One – Meeting the players

The first step in stakeholder management is stakeholder identification. Not all stakeholders are created equally and so it’s wise to rank and identify them according to the degree of power and influence they might exercise on your projects and project teams. As program manager, you will find that you need to get closer to the high rollers and stay away from the pretenders.

Remember, although certain key players may have the clout to cancel or push your program through the next phase, they may simply not be interested enough to exercise that power. The lesson here is, ‘identify the stakes (the risk)’ along with the stakeholder. If the information you are trying to communicate has nothing to do with the stakeholder’s area of interest, you have only managed to waste his time as well as your own.

Step Two – Performing a balancing act

Program managers in the context of a large program find it useful to group stakeholders in useful categories. One such meaningful set could be ‘primary’ stakeholders and ‘secondary’ stakeholder. While balancing the need of the overall program, it is essential that the program management team does not address a concern from a secondary program stakeholder at the expense of creating an issue for a primary stakeholder group.

Step Three – Getting through the Six degrees of separation

Once you’ve identified the key influences, you need to position yourself as a positive enabler of their expectations, not simply a middleman who shows up at odd hours asking for opinions or favors.

This may involve familiarizing yourself with the way stakeholders like to see data and the frequency at which they like to updated on the status of the program. Overburdening stakeholders with information is a bad practice which makes them blind or at least indifferent over a period of time. Getting to know the people the stakeholder works with gets you closer to knowing the stakeholder’s style and history of decisions on past projects.

Step Four – Building trust

Program managers need to build relationships over a period of time in order for concerned stakeholders to communicate their unvoiced expectations. This pays off during critical periods for the project, when the program manager needs all the support he or she can get. One way to avoid a negative impact during milestone reviews is establishing a back-channel of communication with influential stakeholders that forewarns them about the nature of emergency.

Trust being a two-way bridge means that you need to reciprocate in kind. If a stakeholder was unavailable for a key meeting, it’s important that you set up a personal call to this person to let him know the events and outcomes. There are places and times where an e-mail just won’t do.

Step Five – Managing conflicts

Sometimes the news coming out of your program may seem like so much ‘white noise’ to stakeholders. Multiple project managers communicating with the same stakeholder can create irreversible damage to the credibility of the program. Program managers have to organize this chorus of information into a single consistent voice.

Step Six – Tracking and Support

While distributing active status reports amongst stakeholders is part of standard practice, it is important to maintain an accurate log report of various communications and concerns to ensure consistency. Over the lifecycle of the program, these updated logs may point out key stakeholders who were overlooked in the communication process.

Program leadership must be perceived to form the backbone of stakeholder support. The team must be seen to collectively support the program and its goals. Programs are jeopardized when stakeholders perceive backbiting and rumors to be signs of deterioration in program direction and unity.

Because project managers are focused only on the quality of their deliverables, they often fail to grasp the reason behind a failed sign-off. Stakeholder management is after all, more than making an inventory of requirements.

In a recent seminar I held for project managers, I was surprised at the questions I was getting from what I thought was a novice audience. I tried underplaying the context, promising to answer in more detail at a later engagement but the participants really seemed hungry to understand the bigger issues behind project management. I sensed a distinct hum of mindsets elevating their threshold of consciousness the moment I mentioned program management.

I remember a few years back, it was delivery managers who played the role of managing project managers and since the emphasis then was on delivery and quality, this arrangement perhaps worked. Today the scenario is moving towards business value management and that’s the new space where program management is addressing its solutions.

I believe that in order to facilitate the entry of next generation of program managers, there is a need for a formal development of programmatic interventions. It’s worth mentioning here the PMBOK is of limited use when it comes to program management. Since the former is centered more on single projects and their execution, program managers do not find in it much value for expressing the comparative business value of multiple projects. This is why in 2006 PMI has published The Standard for Program Management, a separate resource for program managers whose ultimate aim is the alignment of multiple projects to organizational goals.

Let’s try to understand some of the most challenging issues that are faced by program managers today. Here are the key areas of conflict that stood out for program managers I recently interacted with:

Information management: Managing multiple streams of data to consistently generate meaningful information is a big challenge while monitoring diverse project priorities. Common reporting formats such as templates and forms are often altered beyond recognition during implementation, rendering essential data unreadable and open to misinterpretation. The key challenge for a PgMgr here is translating discrete and seemingly unrelated project data from traditional sources (such as scheduling, budgeting and effort status) into meaningful business information for stakeholders.

Stakeholder management: Program managers are always found chasing updates for various stakeholders. Different stakeholders may have conflicting expectations from the same projects. The key challenge here is to align these multiplying demands to commonly shared criteria for success. Moreover, PgMgrs need to have the instincts for identifying implicit expectations and voicing silent demands while interviewing stakeholders.

Establishing Authority: PgMrgs are expected to bring order and clarity to chaotic scenarios. This does not mean they can act as lords of the realm. Instead program managers mostly work behind the scene and cannot afford to be seen as intervening in day-to-day execution of projects. The challenge here is establishing authority without being seen as a menace. It’s about leaving the day to day project dilemmas to project managers while maintaining a light but supportive influence on project decisions.

Performance Reporting: Unlike project managers monitoring the progress of single projects, program managers need to submit reports that review the entire program’s performance while identifying strategic issues affecting the program. Accurate, frequent and visible program performance reporting clearly provides value to the organization. This particular kind of reporting addresses a variety of audiences and requires multiple views to satisfy various stakeholder expectations. The challenge that the PgMgr faces in this complex activity is that the scope of services keeps changing and new stakeholders enter the project scenario; so the program manager has to constantly update metrics that are specific to emerging areas of interest.

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