Program Management Training: Essential Skills for Your Program Success

Program Management Course Outline

• Introduction

  • Program roadmap
  • Program management plan
  • Managing the Benefits

• What is Program Management?

  • Distinguishing between a project and a program
  • Defining programs, projects, and portfolios
  • Clarifying the roles of the project and program managers
  • Setting up a Program Management Office (PMO)

• Aligning Programs and Organizational Strategy

  Organizational strategy

  • Developing a vision, goals, and objectives
  • Assessing the maturity of the organizational strategy

  Enterprise architecture

  • Defining the business, data, application, and technology architectures
  • Describing the organizational portfolio

  Defining the current “as-is” and future “to-be” states

  • Assessing the “as-is” and future “to-be” states
  • Determining which parts of the current state can be used
  • Specifying required changes to existing systems and processes
  • Establishing required new systems and retirement of systems
  • Avoiding the “shelfware” syndrome
  • Aligning program requirements with EA

• The Program Business Case

  Creating a defendable program business case

  • Structuring a business case
  • Using a process and a template

  Financial Analysis

  • Determining costs and benefits
  • Applying financial tools

  Risks and opportunities

  • Identifying risks and opportunities
  • Analyzing risks and prioritizing initiatives

• Establishing the Program Roadmap

  Program scope

• Defining program scope
• Developing the program Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
  • Establishing program components
  • Selecting major milestones
  • Developing the roadmap
  • Estimating the program costs
  • Developing subsidiary plans
  • Determining resources
  • Generating an acquisition strategy
  • Developing a program transition plan
  • Identifying program benefits
  • Planning benefit realization
  • Delivering program benefits
  • Reviewing and optimizing benefits realization
  • Transitioning and sustaining benefits

• Program Governance and Stakeholder Engagement

  Program governance

  • Establishing the proper governance structure
  • Distinguishing program, portfolio and organizational governance
  • Defining the decision-making authority
  • Implementing a program governance

  Stakeholder engagement

  • Identifying program stakeholders
  • Creating stakeholder profiles
  • Generating a stakeholders register
  • Planning stakeholder engagement
  • Developing a program communications plan
  • Establishing the program management team

• Program Monitoring

  Program dashboard

  • Designing the dashboard to assess program health
  • Establishing dashboard utilization and updates

  Metrics

  • Identifying necessary metrics
  • Selecting source of metrics
  • Assessing metrics benefits vs. costs

  Risks

  • Identifying and classify program risks and opportunities
  • Assessing program risks probabilities and impacts
  • Selecting risks for the dashboard

  Monitor and Control

  • Identifying issues
  • Assessing program health

• Leading a Program

  Leadership skills

  • Setting the vision
  • Protecting the team
  • Dealing with adversity
  • Understanding and working with stakeholder expectations

  Management skills

  • Establishing and following the processes
  • Selecting the right people for the right roles
  • Mentoring and support
  • Negotiating for resources

  Communications

  • Communicating effectively with staff at all levels
  • Driving proper communications between project teams
  • Ensuring proper communications with all stakeholders