Proper programme management a boon for business

Programme management is a little-known technique - but it could save your company many management headaches, says Danny Bradbury.

"The manager, Malcolm, was a bit choked," said my wife, returning home one day from her temping job at BT. "Everyone else just threw up their hands. After all, they know what it's like, working for a large firm."

The team she'd been temping with had just found out that its project had been cancelled. Unknown to anyone, another team had been working on an identical project in another part of the company. One of the projects had to be axed, throwing two years' work down the drain. How's that for job satisfaction?

Such mishaps are not uncommon in large companies, says Geoff Reiss. Reiss is director of strategy for the Program Management Group plc, which sells a programme management tool called Hydra. He is also chair of ProgM, a special interest group formed by the British Computing Society and the Association of Project Management.

Companies often concentrate on projects without understanding how they fit together, he warns. "We found a hospital in England where one group was busy preparing to fit double glazing and another group was planning to knock the building down and build another one."

Effective programme management is a good way to stop such blunders, saving time, money and morale. Many companies tend to focus on project management alone, using a mixture of project management software and spreadsheets to keep things ticking along smoothly.

However, it is sometimes difficult to look at the big picture when you are focused on the details. Gathering a selection of projects into an umbrella programme can help you to understand how separate activities contribute to an overall company goal, which makes it easier to hit the wider business objectives.

For example, redeveloping a payroll system might seem like a simple project but it might encompass other tasks such as training the HR department, arranging for data transfer and reallocating staff to adjust to a reduced headcount caused by the increased efficiency of the system.

"Project portfolio management tools enable you to balance the investment that you are going to make in money and people, and the benefits that you are expecting to get back," says Reiss.

Portfolio management tools help managers to get a clear idea of which projects fit into a particular programme, the resources available to them and how they are performing. Busy managers concentrating on business objectives don't want to see every detail from individual projects but they do want a bird's-eye view provided by feeding key performance indicators from the projects up to a central dashboard.

One company providing such a tool set is Primavera. David Oates, VP of international sales for the company, explains THAT the metrics most often requested by customers are the available skills and the unfillable demand, along with the ratio of permanent to contract staff working within a portfolio of projects. Such data can help you to make high-end decisions, he explains.

"If you talk to your average CIO right now, he couldn't even tell you what is being worked on and the resources being used," he says. "What he wants to know is, 'am I going to get a return on a particular project, does it match the corporate strategy, do I know what the return on investment period is and is it worth continuing to invest in that project?'"

For companies that don't want to spend time purchasing and deploying new tools internally, there are alternatives. Aspire offers a hosted portfolio management solution as part of its Aspireview service. The company's software enables managers to gather the information on different projects from around the organisation, providing them with an RAG (Red, Amber, Green) indicator of project performance according to those metrics.

This traffic light-style metaphor is common in portfolio management circles. Nigel Watson, a director at Aspire, says: "The management team will only sit down for an hour a month to review performance, so you need them to focus on the important things. It's about making that simple."

However, getting to the stage where you know what information to enter into a portfolio management tool can be a project in itself. Companies should examine their high-end strategies before deciding on the programmes that will contain individual portfolios of projects.

Ideally the company should have a thread running from the top end corporate mission statement through to the most detailed project statistics. "A key process in programme management is using the programmes in a rational way but most projects pop up in an irrational way because decisions are made in a data vacuum," explains Program Management Group's Reiss, who helped craft the Program Management Maturity Model, a document that helps organisations evaluate their programme management capabilities.

Once you have a set of programmes in place, you can begin breaking up projects between them but this can be a complex task because most companies have some historical baggage to deal with. Few firms undertake a programme management strategy without projects already running. "The first thing that most organisations do is to create a project register and many organisations find that they have no idea what all of their projects are," says Reiss. This register will help you to rationalise your project portfolio as you begin integrating it with your programme management layer.

One of the biggest problems for programme management lies in getting the business to use the results of such programmes effectively, warns Reiss. Programme managers never deliver the benefits to the business themselves, he explains - they simply give companies a new way of doing something which in turn delivers the business benefit. "We haven't nailed down the relationship between programme managers and the business yet, meaning that the business often doesn't use what it is given properly, so these things can trip up at the last minute."

This is where the most important part of the solution comes in. Software tools are important but it's the 'liveware', in the form of the programme manager, who can forge the links with any organisation necessary to carry the programme through to a positive conclusion. A programme manager needs to be a jack of all trades - a strategist and a politician with lots of contacts, Reiss says.

Successful programme planning can make your business fly - but remember to use a mixture of tools, techniques and most importantly, people to get the job done.