Roles, Responsibilities and the 1990s
The key roles and responsibilities of project management are shown in Table
1.
|
Role
|
Responsibilities
|
|
Project Sponsor
|
• Manage the investment in the project
• Deliver the agreed success criteria
• Make the agreed return or cost savings
|
|
Project Manager
|
• Lead, direct and manage the project and project team, and
• Deliver the project deliverables to an agreed time, cost and quality/performance
|
|
Project User/Operator
|
• Operate the deliverables/assets, and
• Deliver the planned return or cost saving
|
Table 1. Key roles and responsibilities of project management
As can be seen from these roles, the idea of project success now needed more
definition – namely success for whom? The project sponsor's success would
depend upon the delivery of the project benefits to time, operating cost and
performance. The project manager's success would continue to be measured in terms
of delivery to agreed time, cost and quality. The users measure of success would
be: "Did it work as we had planned, with an acceptably low level of breakdowns,
and in a reasonably user friendly way?"
By the early 1990's, the buzz phrase was "Management by Project",
and recognition of the need for all "general" managers to have knowledge
and skills in project management in their "tool box" and that organizations
would have portfolios of projects managing various changes. This has to a great
extent come about and most UK MBA programs now contain some project management
in their core programs. During the late 1980's and early 1990's the words "Program
Management" entered the sphere of project management. The idea was to plug
the gap in organizations between strategy and projects.
Programs were seen as the layer that converted the strategy into a coherent
set of projects to achieve the strategy and corporate vision. Figure
1 shows in bar chart form the development of project and program management
in the last 5 decades. The first definition of a program that I used was "a
set of related projects with a common strategic goal or aim". Unlike projects,
programs had no distinctive start or end, rather the strategy could be accelerated
or slowed down, by introducing new projects, speeding up existing ones, slowing
up new projects, or stopping existing and planned projects respectively. With
program management came the idea that managing projects was a form of "change
management" and that program management was a disciplined approach to managing
change in organizations. Furthermore, the idea of benefits management came to
a head with the project (and program) focus now being to deliver the benefits
of the project (or program) rather than the project (or program) itself.
 Figure 1. Bar chart showing development of project and program management
As a new millennium starts, both program management and benefit delivery are
high on the program and project management community's agenda. Most chief executive
officers now want to know when they will get the benefits and the forecast level
of benefit, rather than when the project will be complete and at what cost. Processes
and systems to answer these questions are still being developed and are far from
maturity.
The UK's Association for Project Management formed a Special Interest Group
(SIG) in program management a few year's ago and it has the highest membership
of any of the current SIGs. The Office of Government Commerce in UK (http://www.ogc.gov.uk) has recently developed
and issued an approach to program management called "Managing Successful
Programs" (MSP).[1] The APM Group
has helped the OGC to establish a set of accredited trainers in MSP, together
with an examination to test knowledge and experience of practitioners before
they are awarded their accreditation (http://www.programs.org).
1.
Managing Successful Programs, published by The Stationary Office in 1999, ISBN
0 11 330016 6, produced by the CCTA, now the OGC (office of Government Commerce)
in the UK
|
Early
Background
