Program Management can refer to the management of a set of related projects within a project portfolio. A primary responsibility in managing project portfolios is the overall financial management of projects in meeting strategic goals. Other key objectives include managing risk across the portfolio and ensuring project strategic alignment across the organization. Program Management can also refer to a new or special management focus area for business improvement. Sometimes this refers to a project whose product is applied over and over again to a broad target audience in the company or across differing geographies or organizations.
At Oracle Corporation, Wayne MacNeil served as both an Insight Program Director and later as an Executive Insight Program Director. Each of these referred to special Oracle pre-sales and sales initiatives that spanned multiple years, across virtually all of Oracle’s products and brought new methods and tools for customer engagement to the sales organization. This is an example of Program Management established for management focus on changing the way pre-sales and sales were conducted in order to bring about business improvement. A major goal for the Oracle program was converting a sales force from a traditional sales approach to a “consultative selling” model. As part of that effort, Wayne developed Oracle’s “Master Financial Calculator” supporting “unlimited license agreement” ROI business case financial modeling and license negotiations and also established new “consultative selling” approaches for customer engagement.
Another program that Wayne MacNeil led was one for Bose Corporation that was named “Partner 2000″. This program was the embodiment of a new European Sales Market Strategy and Back Office Administration model that was customized and implemented separately in each Bose subsidiary in Western Europe and also with independent distributors. The program was a radical new approach for doing business in response to a crisis in sales performance over a multi-year period.
Wayne has also developed and implemented Leadership Development programs for both Accenture and for Bose Corporation. At Accenture, Wayne was project manager for development of a 3.5 day course for grooming senior managers selected to be new Partners in the firm. At Bose, Wayne developed/customized an 18 month leadership development program, based on the Dooley Leadership Learning Forum model (also adopted nationwide by the SIM (Society for Information Management) organization) for developing leadership and soft side management skills with high potential managers in IT and Finance. This course ran for 2.5 days in an offsite conference center every other month for 18 months until graduation.
Another common program type is a collection of related projects within a project portfolio that are tracked and typically managed by a single portfolio manager. (there may be multiple project portfolios within a company’s strategy portfolio and associated with key strategic goals and objectives) Projects, programs and portfolios are at different scale and levels of abstraction but they all should provide clear line of sight to company strategy and attainment of important goals that drive company success.
The way that projects and portfolios are related and the standards for how projects are managed, tracked, reported and governed across the organization stems from establishment of a Project Management Office (PMO)
MacNeil Consulting can help your senior management team to implement its vision and strategy for success through professional planning, development and implementation of specific management programs. (per our consulting areas of expertise) We can also assist in the establishing and development of a professional Project Management Office (PMO) with implementation of PMP methods, tools and techniques for project management. Lastly, we can provide assistance in management and assessment of Project Portfolios and development of methods for Portfolio Management.
Let us assess the maturity level of your PMO organization and assist to improve the effectiveness of the organization that is so relied upon to implement the company’s vision and strategy.
Use this link to contact MacNeil Consulting about Program Management.
