However, project managers with years of experience may have more senior titles than program managers, and program managers are not always the direct manager of the project manager. It should be noted that organizations may also use program and project manager interchangeably.
Program managers can manage several project managers. The project manager often works with the program manager to determine project goals, acquire resources, and build project teams. Project managers can be embedded within specific teams like engineering, IT, or design. They can also be a part of a project management team, and work on several different teams depending on the project.
Scrum Master vs. Project Manager: Differences, Explained. How to Become a Project Manager in 5 Steps. Project Manager Salary: Your Guide. Burning Glass. Project Management Institute.
This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals. Program Manager vs. Program manager vs. Specific tasks can include: Plan and acquire project resources like budget, teams, and tools Communicate with stakeholders including program managers and project team members to ensure alignment around goals Maintain progress on projects by motivating team members, addressing pain points, and leading quality assurance Read more: What Does a Project Manager Do?
A Career Guide Program managers vs. Project management is the process of leading a project performed by a team to achieve certain goals, such as building a new product. A project represents a single, focused piece of work with a specific scope and defined output. Projects can run for several years, but their main focus remains the same.
Project management is the process of delivering value that incrementally moves a program forward. Despite the emphasis on artifacts and deliverables, project management still involves strategy and planning, since a project manager must determine how to meet the goals laid out at the beginning of the project. Once a project is underway, a project manager tracks progress, allocates resources, manages risks, communicates, and more. Program management entails managing a program with multiple, related projects.
Since programs are linked to strategic initiatives, they are often long-running and possibly permanent. Programs continue through organizational change, contribute to multiple goals, and contain many projects that deliver specific components of the larger strategic initiative. At the highest level, a project generally focuses on outputs, while a program focuses on outcomes.
Program managers need to balance delivering artifacts, engaging with strategic decisions, managing stakeholders, and mitigating risks across the program. In a fully empowered organizational program, program managers should be able to solve — or connect to people who can solve — and plan to mitigate any problem that impacts the strategic initiative they seek to achieve. Because of the breadth of their responsibilities, program managers play a key enabling role in companies.
The role is flexible by design to meet the different challenges that teams encounter while going to production. A program manager reviews and evaluates a portfolio by connecting with teams to identify any risk mitigation or improvement opportunities. These connections can be coffee chats or team meetings. This includes connecting with project teams to ensure the project managers are supported and unblocked. Risk management is a key element of portfolio management.
Risks include a project timeline slipping, changing requirements, or the discovery of additional stakeholders. A program manager should be aware of anything that could impact the progress or outcome of the program and related projects. Ideally, a program manager can take corrective actions to reduce or manage risks in the portfolio.
A program manager connects with stakeholders to get a sense of the wider context that surrounds goals. These conversations provide key insights into the overall landscape. By partnering with stakeholders, a program manager can help guide project teams.
The operating model shapes how teams progress toward their goals. This can include establishing communication channels and reporting methods, identifying goals, establishing priorities across the entire program. During the course of a program, a program manager optimizes the operating model to increase the likelihood of success and reduce the impact of risks.
Decision-making takes many forms, from running a meeting with decision-makers, to compiling background information on what decisions are needed, or doing a comparative analysis of multiple options.
Specific program managers may lean into different areas, depending on their strengths. The program manager reviews outcomes to identify opportunities for improvement in systems, processes, or results. The focus and scope of each program manager shape the specifics of how they engage with these practices. As you can see, program and project managers work on highly related tasks.
The primary difference between these two roles is scope and ambiguity:. Jira Align provides program management features that connect business strategy to technical execution. Its program management features include visual program boards, forecasting and simulation, program tracking, multi-tiered roadmaps, dependency management, and more.
Laureli Mallek is a builder at heart who supports organizational effectiveness by removing blockers to fulfilling work. In comparison, projects use change to control variance from planned cost and schedule while protecting various aspects and characteristics of the planned outputs.
Projects always work towards minimizing or avoiding risk as it can impact the project severely. Projects exist in an environment where the output, benefits, or outcome of the work may be uncertain and unpredictable.
Since projects have more or less fixed constraints at the outset, there is a lower chance of certainty. In comparison, programs at their start are a little less defined and may have more significant uncertainty than projects, even projects that define the programs. The same occurs throughout the life of the projects— as the projects progress, they become more defined. This, in turn, ensures less risk for projects and greater risk for the programs. Projects and programs may respond to complexity in different ways and due to different types of complexity, but generally respond to complexity in similar ways: it takes more time and increases uncertainty to both.
Program complexity may arise from governance, stakeholders , definition agreement of the future state among stakeholders , benefits delivery, and interdependency connections between components.
Governance is the monitoring, management, and support applied to meet goals. For projects, the goals support the deliverable and its enablement of objectives. For programs, governance establishes program support and maintains oversight. Another difference between projects and programs regarding governance is the way it is implemented.
In projects, governance is implemented and integrated through a collection of organizational, project, and stakeholder requirements and constraints. The job of the project manager is to lead and manage—direct the team, engage the stakeholders, and influence and motivate.
Portfolio management focuses on selecting the optimum mix of projects and programs that the organization should undertake based on its available funding and resources. Program management focuses on the coordination of a number of related projects over time to deliver outcomes that benefit the organization, and projects are undertaken for the efficient delivery of a defined output.
Programs may contain elements of work outside of the scope of the discrete projects in the program. The OGC has very similar views embedded in its methodologies.
As can be seen from the above, the definition of a program is consistent. Programs involve the coordinated management of two or more projects to achieve benefits that would otherwise not be obtained. A program's objective of realizing benefits is a very different one than that of a project or of project management, which, according to their standard definitions, focus on the efficient delivery of products, services, or results—i. A regularly used short description of the difference is that projects are focused on the efficient creation of outputs; programs are focused on delivering outcomes.
The difference between how complicated the work is and its complexity is that managing complicated work i. The consequences of technical difficulty are definable, predictable, and manageable with the right people. The essence of complexity, on the other hand, is that the future is inherently unpredictable and the reactions of people to each other within the project or program's network of relationships are nonlinear.
The size of the project or program will impact the degree of difficulty in achieving its objectives, but large projects are not necessarily complicated or complex. The management challenges are essentially in the area of logistics. One only has to contrast this type of megaproject with the difficulties of successfully delivering a small program to initiate a culture change within an established bureaucracy say, a new timesheet system with supporting software to appreciate size is only one dimension of a project or program.
Complicated high-tech projects and programs are inherently more difficult to manage than technically simple projects and programs. The nature of the technical difficulties and the degree of certainty largely depend on how well-understood the work is. Bleeding-edge research has a far higher level of uncertainty associated with every aspect of its management than work of similar technical difficulty that has been undertaken several times before. The degree of understanding of both the work's characteristics and the way it will be accomplished on the part of the client is as important to the success of the endeavor as the understanding of the team.
The lower the levels of knowledge and understanding, the more difficult it is to achieve a successful result. Complexity theory has become a broad platform for the investigation of complex interdisciplinary situations and helps understand the social behaviors of teams and the networks of people involved in and around a project. These ideas apply equally to small in-house projects and to large complicated programs. In this regard, complexity is not a synonym for complicated or large.
Complexity theory has developed from and includes the earlier field of study known as chaos theory. Some of these ideas appear directly relevant to understanding project and program management from a stakeholder relationship perspective and are generally more important in program management.
The degree of uncertainty associated with the desired output from the team's endeavors has a major impact on the management of the project or program. This is different from the issues around bleeding-edge projects, as discussed earlier. When a bleeding-edge project has a clearly defined endpoint, you are on a quest in which the challenge is finding the optimum route to the end. The less certain the client is of the requirements, the greater the uncertainty associated with delivering a successful project or program, and the greater the effort required from the team to work with the client to evolve a clear understanding of what's required for success.
This is not a problem as long as all of the stakeholders appreciate that they are on a journey to initially determine what success looks like, and then deliver the required results.
Exhibit 1: Project typology. From All Change! Obeng, , London: Prentice Hall. Copyright One of the more established ways of describing projects is a typology that maps the interaction of uncertainty and technical difficulty Figure 1.
There are low levels of uncertainty and ambiguity; risks are largely known and manageable. Value is largely achieved by delivering the requirements on time and on budget.
A typical software program of this type would be installing a standard software upgrade across a large organization based in several different cities and with several operating divisions. With these projects and programs, the objective is clear but the way to achieve the objective is uncertain. At the end of the day, success or failure is clear-cut; the objective has been achieved or not.
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