Program Management

When it comes to program management, B&IT has first-class references from customers in the manufacturing industries and technical trade. Often, the need for an adequate program management is not recognized initially or arises only in connection with a project crisis.

Program management can be characterized as follows:

• The need for it arises from growing personnel, financial and technical dependencies among projects.
• It involves the creation of an organizational framework – with appropriate processes, rules and standards – to control and coordinate projects over a long period of time.
• The program manager is the central authority, a leader with the necessary experience and competence who ensures that the overall project has the required presence and standing with corporate management.
• The program manager is also responsible for selecting key personnel and suppliers, as well as for planning and controlling the overall project.
• In addition, the program manager establishes the organizational framework so that the projects – individually and in combination – can proceed in an orderly fashion. This framework includes, for example,project standards, project charter, project approach and methodology, project planning, reporting and controlling, and much more.

In general, the effects that master planning and cross-project resource management have on increasing the efficiency of parallel projects have been vastly underestimated.

As a matter of fact, among the core tasks of program management is to come up with a plan of milestones and resources that is at the same time ambitious and realistic, and robust enough that short-term events or incidents, which might have a severe impact on the planned involvement of bottleneck resources, don’t endanger the execution and progress of the entire program.

Increasing the overall program efficiency by industrializing repetitive activities and procedures, e.g.,rollouts, is another major task of the program manager. Here he acts again as an organizer, making a significant contribution to cost reduction.

By relying on their long-term experience, especially in international reorganization and IT projects, B&IT management consultants can head your entire project or program in a new direction, e.g., in one of the following situations:

• There are a lot of projects running parallel to one another, with visible friction between and among them.
• The various departments have withdrawn their staff completely or partially from the project. Consequently, it is on its way to becoming a purely “IT” project.
• New projects are constantly being added and there is uncertainty regarding the priorities,< />schedules, capacities and resources.
• The decision-making processes are too complex and take too much time.
• “Growing scope”
• The expenses of the ongoing projects tend to be high compared to the results obtained thus far. At the same time, the required experience in international reorganization and IT projects is missing.
• The global rollout is confronted with rapidly growing resistance and excessive costs.

To meet these problems, the B&IT program managers provide, e.g., the following:

• Analysis and structuring of your project landscape as a whole – shaping a “program”
• Consistent alignment with business priorities
• Appropriate involvement of stakeholders and communication
• Application of proven methodology and establishment of the program-management processes and relevant rules and standards
• Coordination of the solution architecture (at a high level) and coordination of critical resources
• Transparency of all currently planned and ongoing projects, their resources and budgets(planned/actual)
• In this case, our program managers will focus on what is feasible with respect to organization and technology. If necessary, they will also articulate unpleasant truths.

Our consulting services:

• Short assessment / Workshop program management
• Preparation / Initiation of program management
• Coaching: Process design for program management
• Coaching: Program management
• Takeover of program management (e.g., interim management) by B&IT