Implementing Program Management

Templates and Forms Aligned with the Standard for Program Management, Third Edition (2013) and Other Best Practices

Ginger Levin, Allen R. Green

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781000755763
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Success in program management requires discipline, complete plans, well-run meetings, accurate record keeping, and adherence to global best practices. Implementing Program Management: Templates and Forms Aligned with the Standard for Program Management, Third Edition (2013) and Other Best Practices provides the templates and guidelines for the plans, forms, agendas, registers, and procedures you will need.

Ginger Levin and Allen Green wrote Implementing Program Management Templates and Forms Aligned with the Standard for Program Management – Second Edition (2008) in 2010. Since then it has become the go-to reference for program practitioners, colleges, universities, and those studying for the Program Management Professional (PgMP ® ) credential from the Project Management Institute (PMI ® ).

Based on PMI's Standard for Program Management — Third Edition (2013) and other best practices, the updated edition of this bestselling reference provides a program management methodology consisting of reports, forms, templates, and documents. It includes identifiable documents referenced in the latest Standard for Program Management as well as other helpful ones omitted from prior editions.

The book deals with the full program management life cycle—program definition, program benefits delivery, and program closure—to support the documentation requirements for your programs. The authors have updated the templates and forms in this book to complement what is included in the Third Edition and to include what they feel are best practices for managing programs.

All the templates included in the book can be accessed online via the Support Material section on https://tinyurl.com/4k4j9phe and can be easily customized to meet the unique requirements of your organization.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.

—Jim Rohn

This book is a workbook for successful program management. Success is program management requires discipline—the kind of discipline that results in repeatability of success. It requires appropriately complete plans, well-run meetings with meaningful agendas, accurate record keeping, and general adherence to global best practices. Toward those ends, this book is a compendium of plans, forms, agendas, registers, and procedures.

This work is specifically designed to be compatible with and is a supplementary to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI^®) Standard for Program Management—Third Edition (2013). Starting out to produce artifact prototypes for all the documents mentioned therein, we found that the task proved a bit more elusive than expected. Some documents are explicitly enumerated in the Standard for Program Management—Third Edition (2013), and others are more implicit—so we have made judgments as to what to include. We have included almost all of the identifiable documents referenced in the Standard for Program Management—Third Edition (2013). We have also kept some useful ones from prior editions that are now omitted. We also added some of our own. In a couple of instances, the Standard for Program Management—Third Edition (2013) defers to PMI’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)—Fifth Edition (2013) (PMBOK Guide, Fifth Edition—2013), and so do we.

This work is not intended to be a complete guide to program management. Nor will it be entirely useful as a supplementary study for PMI’s Program Management Professional (PgMP^®) credential examination. You will need the Standard for Pro­ gram Management—The Edition (2013), the Examination Content Outline or ECO (2011), and some of the other available texts and articles on program management. We make no assumptions about your level of experience in program management but accept the fact that you may or may not be new to the discipline.

Our focus is on three heretofore neglected agendas: (1) helping you apply the Standard for Program Management—Third Edition (2013) and the other best practice guidelines included in this book in the successful execution of your program on a daily basis, (2) meeting the needs of undergraduate and graduate students at the university level and those in short courses in program management who may require guidance in their initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing exercises, and (3) serving as a reference book for PgMP aspirants with its organization according to the program management domains as specified in the ECO.

About Program Management

Although projects have been under way since the time of the pyramids, and project management emerged as a profession in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we now work in a project-oriented society. However, rather than having only one or two large projects under way, organizations have hundreds of projects of various sizes and complexities. Organizations began to view projects as assets and started practicing management by projects.

The emphasis, though, now has shifted to program management.

If projects, and other ongoing work, can be grouped into a program because they share common attributes, the organization can then realize more benefits than if the projects were managed in a stand-alone fashion, resources can be coordinated across projects, customer relationship management is improved, as well as supply chain management, and greater effectiveness and efficiencies can result.

Recognizing the increasing use of programs, in 2006, PMI issued a standard on program management, which was updated at the end of 2008, and again updated at the end of 2012 and published in 2013. This standard describes best practices in program management and contains a common set of terms to best communicate globally among the various program stakeholders. These best practices are of enormous value, as they show the importance of key documents to initiate a program, plan it, execute and monitor and control it, and close it. We now are working in a society in which program management is the norm and not the exception and in which programs and projects are considered organizational assets. We are managing by both programs and projects.

Let’s get to work!

Chapter 2

Getting Started

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Planning is woefully implemented in some programs. On the other hand, in certain cultures, planning is almost an (endless) end in itself—sort of like the infamous “paralysis by analysis.” Your world needs to be somewhere in between.

An important take-home message here is that, given natural and often turbulent change in a program’s environment, planning in too much detail can be a counterproductive drain on your time. Planning in too little detail, however, can cause you to overlook things that need to be at least thought through in advance. One of the most important program manager skills is the ability to do just the right amount of all the right things and at the right time.

If the documents we describe are new to your organization, almost certainly the first application will be the most difficult. Major parts of your work will become what the Project Management Institute (PMI^®) refers to as organizational process assets. So if you are in that situation, you will be a pioneer. As they say about pioneers, they are the ones with the arrows in their back. That is sort of like us perhaps, in even daring such a work as this book.

Why So Many Plans?

The seeming paradox that leads off this chapter actually makes sense! How?

During the often furious pace of a program’s life time, indeed things do change. And unmanaged change is your enemy, while considered and managed change is your friend. When it occurs, your prior planning work has provided you with an understanding of the program and proves invaluable in defining and implementing the necessary changes.

In numerous templates that follow, in each phase of the Program Life Cycle domain, we begin in each one with a brief statement of its value, followed by a detailed description of its contents, and then a template, ready to tailor and use.

Since we have organized this book based on the five domains in the Examination Content Outline (ECO), we have included plans that we recommend in benefits, stakeholders, and governance in their specific chapters and other templates in this book so there are even more templates to consider!

First Steps

As in all endeavors, it is best to take advantage of preexisting assets. As pointed out in the preface, your organization is unique. In some cases, you will need only to reference existing standard documents for your organization. In other cases, you may need to prepare extensive documents using ours as a starting point. And in yet other cases, you might only need to include a paragraph as part of another document, indicating how due consideration has been given to the matter at hand.

First, consult with your program management office, if available, or senior management to get electronic access to any templates, forms, and standards for program, quality, financial management, etc., and other plans that you can adapt for your program. Depending on the program and project management maturity of your organization, these items may be fairly easily obtained. If all else fails, you may be able to locate suitable plans for similar programs in the past, or just begin with the templates we provide. In some cases, you will be able to refer to external standards by reference, so long as they are appropriately archived in your program repository.

Next, where applicable, gather program-unique standards that your customer requires. Being able to refer to these items may make your writing experience considerably easier.

Chapter 3

Strategic Program Management/Alignment

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

—Seneca

In this phase there is as yet no program—that is, a program charter does not yet exist. In fact, the purpose of this phase is to justify the program, usually through an approved the business case. A description of the benefits to be achieved, a list of preliminary identified stakeholders, and the program’s mission statement are produced as well in order to convince the organization’s program selection process to accept the effort and to select it as a program rather than as a series of projects.

Our goal is to ensure that our programs not only provide more benefits than if the projects and other work within them were managed separately, but also to ensure that our programs align to our organization’s strategic objectives. In many cases, this alignment sounds easy but in actuality is quite difficult.

While each organization does have a portfolio representing all of the work that is under way, one may not know the contents of the portfolio, or how strategic decisions are made to determine whether or not to add a new program or project to the portfolio, unless it is a mature organization with a well-defined portfolio management process in place. Limited resources make ...