Delegation and Coaching

Examining the responsibilities in the previous section reveals a significant fact: none of the activities mentioned involve running a project! The Program Manager relies even more significantly on delegation than does the project manager. Certainly, the project manager has to delegate items - especially technical items - to team members with specialized skills. However, the program manager relies on individuals to perform those specialized skills, but also must call upon others to actually manage the projects, coordinate status reporting, detect and resolve project-level issues and handle customer interactions. The Program Manager must be sensitive to the abilities of others as a means of knowing when to intervene for the sake of the overall program, without demeaning the individual project manager. Coaching is the key, without imposing specific approaches or styles the Program Manager would use.

Coaching is pivotal to the success of the Program Manager. Successful program management involves capitalizing on the skills of the staff you bring together – which means fully utilizing people with drastically varying styles in the role of project management for the program’s projects. Understanding these styles, being able to select the right people for the right roles and making each individual feel as if they have the ability to run their own piece of the program is a task that can be more art than science.
Guiding the project managers, without imposing your specific style or approach is critical to success. No individual can perform well when utilizing an approach with which they aren’t comfortable. The key to a program manager’s coaching is to leverage the individual strengths of each project manager and successfully accommodate his or her areas of weakness. This needs to be done on a one-on-one basis and with the team of project managers working on the program. The program manager’s project management team must be able to work independently yet must strategically work together to determine if organizational issues will have an affect on the projects and the program they support.

A “Change Perspective”

Managing change is one of the first concepts presented to new project managers, so it shouldn’t be different for program managers, right? Well…think again. Project managers have to assess, handle and determine if change is appropriate and beneficial for their projects. Program managers however have to embrace change in a much different way. Programs are usually much more encompassing than projects, have much longer lifetimes and “touch” a much broader cross-section of the business. In a quickly changing competitive world, change for a program is inevitable versus something that must be assessed for it’s short-term value, as in a project. This being the case, program managers must design their programs to handle change from both a business and a technical perspective.

continue>>

<<back