When your company is dealing with more than one project and this occurs for the larger companies, you face the challenge to align these projects with the main strategy.

How do you make this happen?

The main ingredients of program management are the portfolio of projects and the definition of a shared goal. Management of this portfolio requires a mechanism where you allocate resources (human, systems and infrastructure) over the various projects. Where project management is much to do about managing risk, program management is more about managing benefits; those that contribute most in achieving the strategy.

Some of the frequent program management issues are:

• Conflict in resource allocation. Different project share the same resources.
• Different projects have different and changing business priority and therefore different levels of commitment. This is felt in the resource allocation: Over-allocation in the committed project, under-allocation in the lower priority projects.
• Scope changes of the individual projects because of internal organization issues or external market driven issues.
• Conflicting demands from the different sponsors of the projects in the program.
• The various project sponsors have their own view on requirements and goals of the overall program (and strategy).

Some of these issues can be solved or controlled by a program management method (like the Managing Successful Programs MSP method). A method like the MSP or like Prince in an individual project level will solve quality issues, timing, planning and many other issues. But these methods are not involved with the content.

So what you additionally need is a method or way in which you can manage strategic content. Strategic content is information about the strategy that is made explicit and that is translated into concepts that is easy to communicate. In the same way you can communicate about the performance of the strategy. This could be done by introducing a Balanced Score Card and introducing indicators that measure what you have defined as strategic.

2006 Hans Bool