What is Program Management?
Until the relatively recent and growing popularity of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), widespread familiarity with “programs” has languished in comparison to contexts like “products” and “projects.” Even many of my colleagues don’t have a strong understanding of what program management is, while project and product management are clear roles in their minds.
Given the general lack of understanding of what programs are and what program managers do, I’d like to take a moment to offer my answer to the question of program management, both as a general practice and a function here at Earnest.
What is a Program?
To answer the question posed by the title of this post, we must first define what a program is. We can’t understand program management if we don’t understand what it seeks to manage.
A program is a collection of work (projects, initiatives, objectives — whatever your organization may call them) that delivers overarching business value. As Johanna Rothman puts it in Agile and Lean Program Management, “programs are strategic collections of projects with one business objective.” While each project within a program can provide intermediate value alone, the true value of a program comes from the coordinated execution of all of its constituent projects. In other words, the program whole is greater than the sum of its project parts.
There are many types of programs, from purely technical to highly cross-functional and even process-based, depending on your organization and the business objective at hand. You might have a mobile program, for example, which could include iOS, Android, and Windows Phone teams focused on delivering a complete platform for mobile support. A product program, on the other hand, could include deliverables from multiple teams in your organization (not only product and engineering), all of which are required for a successful launch.
With the evolving landscape of technology and its increasingly inextricable ties to business, I suspect programs will be on the rise within companies both large and small to help marry their technical and non-technical teams.
What is Program Management?
Program managers coordinate execution of a program, mitigating risks, resolving dependencies, and facilitating teams’ many streams of work. According to Rothman, and I here would agree, program management leads “the coordination and facilitation of all the work across the organization to release the product”, the product being the deliverable defined by the program itself.
Recently, I’ve been mentally likening program management to the art of conducting. Just as a conductor helps ensure all of the sections of an orchestra are unified and in sync throughout the performance, so a program manager helps ensure program teams stay on track and are aware of their relationships to both other teams and the program as a whole through delivery.
Where does Program Management Live ?
At Earnest, program management is a young and evolving practice, beginning last May when I joined as its first program manager. Working closely with product, engineering, and our many business stakeholders and teams, it took a while to find its home. It finally landed with the product team given its focus on creating visibility and a shared understanding of the program’s value and status, not to mention its focus on defining the processes by which we can effectively collaborate and communicate.
While other organizations have had the role live in engineering or operations, we believe product is the best place for the role in its current form. If you’re at the scale where programs have emerged, you’ll have to assess where it best fits for you and your team, for there is no one-size fits all.
What does Successful Program Management Look Like?
With its focus on coordination and communication, I strive for program management to achieve three results:
- Sustained visibility and alignment around value and progress
- Informed stakeholders with clear delivery expectations
- A culture of consistent delivery of program and product deliverables
I’m working on how to effectively measure these results, from quantitative metrics to qualitative feedback, which I plan to share in a future post. In the meantime, we can look forward to my friend and colleague Daniel Demetri sharing more about how program managers work with and relate to product managers and technical project managers in the Earnest ecosystem.
Melissa is Program Manager at Earnest. She has previously held the roles of Product Manager, Operations Strategist, and Senior Business Analyst and has extensive project management experience in both technical and non-technical sectors. Melissa is a Fulbright Scholar and graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. Outside of work, Melissa explores the visual, literary, and culinary arts.
Earnest is a San Francisco-based technology company building a modern bank for the next generation. Our Product Management team is a nascent group of technical, entrepreneurial, jacks and jills of all trades, and we are actively hiring!
