You’ve been successful delivering on your key projects, but demand for your IT department’s services is outstripping the supply of resources (people and money).  At the same time, your firm is growing, and it is getting increasingly difficult to track, manage and prioritize all the active, planned and requested projects and initiatives.

Good project management remains important to achieving project success, but program management can take you one step further and help you meet strategic objectives, provide better customer service and manage your limited resources.  Also, as IT develops a strong program management capability, it can be marketed to and utilized by other functions in a firm, ultimately increasing the technology department’s influence and credibility.

Program Management Defined
Program management is the discipline and associated tools required to manage a portfolio of active, planned and requested projects.  Through this discipline, an IT department can view and present an overview of all projects, track their current status, manage resource utilization across projects and, most importantly, assess the impact of changing priorities and budgets across the entire portfolio.  Program management does not replace project management.  Each project in the portfolio continues to have a defined scope, project plan and assigned resources.

Larger firms may have an individual or a group responsible for program management.  At our firm, the program management office is responsible for program management as well as project management methodology within IT.  Smaller firms can still use the program management concept and discipline, and it may not need full-time resources.

The Need for Program Management
Good program management will:

• Improve your ability to guide, monitor and manage all project activity to ensure timeliness and success
• Allow your department to easily adapt to changing priorities and, if necessary, shift resources among projects to meet those priorities
• Help you understand and estimate the impact of shifting resources across the entire project portfolio and explain those impacts to project owners
• Give you the ability to consolidate project reporting to improve visibility and highlight the effect on your firm’s strategies and goals
• Create a metrics-based approach to your project portfolio
• Help your department do a better job on individual projects as project managers will be aware of the larger picture and understand where resource constraints and changing priorities may impact their projects
• Streamline communication to executive management and key project stakeholders

Getting Started
Getting program management working successfully in your organization requires discipline, a plan and a commitment to its execution.  Here is a suggested approach:

Get a Sponsor.  If you are the CIO, you’re it.  If not, discuss the benefits with the CIO.  Make certain you have this person’s support; it is critical for achieving program management success.

Identify a Program Manager.  Someone in your organization will need to "own" program management.  Ideally, this person should be one of your seasoned project managers.  Depending on the amount of projects in your portfolio, this role may not be a full-time job, so it is best to start with an internal resource and go from there.

Create a Weekly Dashboard.  The only way you are going to get the right level of visibility is to capture all your projects, with key data, in one location.  A spreadsheet is fine (to start) and should contain:

• Project name
• Project priority (nondiscretionary, critical, high, medium)
• Status (requested, in progress, on hold, canceled, completed)
• Progress (on target, needs attention)
• Start and end dates
• Project budget
• Project manager and resources

The program manager should update this dashboard on a weekly basis.  This process can start with a face-to-face meeting with each project manager.

Centralize New Project Requests.  Newly requested projects must be sent to the program manager, who will add it to the dashboard for review and approval.  This step is critical to ensure project governance and provides the CIO and executive management an opportunity to align these requests with firm and IT goals.

Prioritize/Approve Projects.  The program manager should present the weekly dashboard to the CIO with the project managers present.  Each newly requested project should be reviewed, rejected or approved and then prioritized.  Active projects should be discussed regarding progress, milestones, issues, resource allocation and budget.  Planned projects may need to be reviewed again due to shifts in priorities.  These discussions are extremely beneficial because they gave visibility to potential synergies and dependencies among projects and ultimately allow the team to manage their individual projects better.

Keep Executive Management/Stakeholders Informed.  It will be important to provide key members of your organization with the right level of visibility to your portfolio of projects.  A project summary and/or executive dashboard should be created to give an overview of the status of the project portfolio.  This will increase customer service and help senior management understand overall demands on IT.

Program Management in Real Life
The approach above may seem straightforward and easy to follow, but some staff members may resist their implementation.  Our advice is start off slow, keep it simple and be patient. You know your firm’s culture better than anyone, so tweak your approach to suit your organization.

As the program management discipline and processes become ingrained in the organization, there are several enhancements you can make.  Several vendors supply integrated portfolio management tools that automate many of the manual processes as well as provide more information and metrics to manage across projects.  These tools can also be used to provide executive dashboards, which provide useful views into the entire project portfolio and inform senior management of the breadth and scope of the portfolio.  Our current portfolio exceeds 80 projects (active and planned) and would be hard to track without a management tool.

Moving Beyond IT
The discipline and techniques applied to program management are not exclusive to IT.  They can be used to manage initiatives across many firm functions.  At Proskauer Rose, other departments have recognized the value provided by the IT program management office, and we have started using this discipline and our tools to assist them.  Key non-IT initiatives have been submitted by finance, business development/marketing, human resources, knowledge management and professional resources.  We are using our tools to track and report on these initiatives to help drive enterprise-wide objectives. 

Program management can get your organization to the next level by ensuring that your project portfolio stays on track, on budget and continues to meet the strategic goals of your growing firm.

About our authors :: :: ::

Phil Wisoff joined Proskauer Rose LLP as the Chief Information Officer in May 2006.  Prior to that, he was the Director of MIS at Skadden Arps.  Phil has over 25 years of experience working in information technology, holding management positions in several industries including accounting, insurance, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals.  He can be reached at pwisoff@proskauer.com.

Michael Klebanow has served as Proskauer Rose LLP’s IT Program Manager since March 2007.  Prior to joining Proskauer, Michael spearheaded global strategic initiatives and business process reengineering projects for Gap Inc., Morgan Stanley and Sony.  He can be reached at mklebanow@proskauer.com.