Project managers should consider becoming a PROGRAM manager

Protect Your Organization from Project Failure

Apr 13, 2024

Read time: 4 minutes

Welcome to The Agie Admiral weekly newsletter where I provide actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing Project Management career

Today at a Glance:

📌 Most project managers should consider becoming a PROGRAM manager.

✍️ Book to read: Computers and Talking to People

🎯 Tool of the week: TrueProjectInsight

☝️ Article I read: Five Tips For Dealing With Conflict In Project Management

🔮 Choosing The Right Approach Is Just The Beginning

Most project managers should consider becoming a PROGRAM manager.

It presents a natural path for career advancement, offering increased salary potential and a more significant influence.

But what specific skills in program management are required to make the career move?

Strategic Planning
Stakeholder Management
Leadership and Team Management

Strategic Planning: Program managers are skilled at developing and implementing strategic plans that align with organizational goals. They have a thorough comprehension of the broader business environment and can translate overarching strategies into practical plans to achieve program success.

Stakeholder Management: Program managers possess strong interpersonal skills and can effectively engage and manage stakeholders at all levels of the organization. They build and maintain relationships with key stakeholders, communicate program objectives and progress, and address stakeholder concerns to ensure alignment and support.

Leadership and Team Management: Program managers demonstrate strong leadership abilities, inspiring and motivating teams to achieve program goals. They provide clear direction, empower team members to make decisions, and foster a collaborative and inclusive work environment. Additionally, they have excellent conflict resolution skills and can effectively navigate and resolve conflicts that arise within the program team.

Additional definition: Program management is the centralized coordination and management of a group of related projects that collectively achieve strategic objectives and deliver benefits.

Book to read:

Computers and Talking to People: A pragmatic guide to stakeholder engagement for IT, technology and digital programmes and projects.

Effective stakeholder engagement is key to delivering successful IT, technology and digital programmes and projects, so why is it such a challenge?

In his book, which has received five-star reviews on Amazon, Andrew Powney distils his years of research and expertise into a pragmatic three-step approach that any project manager, change manager, or stakeholder engagement professional can use.

Andrew has been a stakeholder engagement specialist in IT, technology and digital programmes and projects since 2016.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CSB33SNG/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewpowney/

Tool of the week:

This is my personal pick 🙂

Protect Your Organization from Project Failure

With TrueProject, CXOs, Executives, and Managers can now gain valuable insight into their projects’ health while there is still time to act. TrueProject accurately predicts troubled or even failed projects weeks or months in advance.

More details here: https://trueprojectinsight.com/forms/demo-gs

Choosing The Right Approach Is Just The Beginning

Over the last three years, respondents to the PMI Annual Global Survey on Project Management have reported a steady increase in the use of hybrid approaches in their projects — up 57% from 20% in 2020 to 31.5% in 2023.

While predictive approaches are still the most common, they have declined 24% (from 58% to 43.9%) over the same period. Agile use is up 6% over the same period (from 23% in 2020 to 24.6% in 2023) but has changed negligibly over the last two years, dropping 8.8% from 2022 to 2023.

Overall, these growth trends toward using hybrid project management approaches are expected to continue, with 76% and 73% of our respondents expecting an increase in their organization’s usage of agile and hybrid approaches, respectively, over the next five years; and 34% expecting a decline in their organization’s usage of predictive approaches over the same period.

Source: pmi ; Pulse of Profession Report 2023

Article I read:

Five Tips For Dealing With Conflict In Project Management

Project managers are likely to encounter conflicts when managing teams of diverse individuals. Each team member brings their own unique perspectives, priorities, and working styles, which can lead to disagreements and tensions. However, effective conflict management is essential for maintaining a productive and collaborative work environment, fostering creativity, and ultimately achieving successful project outcomes.

To help you navigate conflicts in your project management role, consider the following five tips:

Five Tips For Dealing With Conflict In Project Management - Master Projects for Unlimited Growth (mpug.com)

In Case You Missed It:

In previous issues I wrote about the most important focus are of the Strong Project Manager:

Leveraging AI in Project Management: Projects are executed in various domains, but the common thread is that they are not operations; therefore, there are plenty of unknowns. One outcome of utilizing AI in project management is that it removes the biases that sometimes direct specific actions on a particular path.
What Effective Project Management means? Effective Project Management is a combination of different skill sets of soft and "technical" skills.