Project Management Career Builder Workshop (Part 3)
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Full Text of Part 3
Hello. It’s Elizabeth here.
I want to start out today saying thank you for taking the time in your day to watch these videos. It’s so great to read emails and Facebook comments from people in the community and to know that there are so many people wanting to excel as project managers, as I know you can.
This is the third video in our training series on building a fantastic career as a project manager. In the second video, I talked about the project management skills, processes and templates that will help you get confident in what can be quite a lonely role. Getting the basics right will help you deliver successful projects and in turn that shows you are capable and deserving of the next step.
When I started the Project Management Rebels group mentoring programme my goal was to share what I’d learnt, and pass on the benefits I’d had from having a mentor. Plus, I’m quite opiniated and I like being able to find the answer to people’s questions! I’ve always believed that sharing what we know is the key to making life easier at work, that was the whole premise of my first book.
I’ve moved on to bigger, more complex projects and programmes, and I worked overseas for a bit too. I’ve created my own career path and I’ve helped other project managers do the same.
Today we’re going to look at two of the common career paths people ready to move on from project management. Programme management and managing a team of project managers. Let’s start with programme management.
What is programme management?
A programme is a collection of related projects, all with similar aims, objectives and resources that together deliver a common outcome and/or significant change; for example, moving the company to being a paperless office would be a programme with a number of projects like:
- Choosing and implementing an electronic document management system for Head Office
- Designing a paperless sales process for use in the company’s shops and implementing it to all branches
- Launching an employee portal for electronic payslips and HR information
- Launching an electronic expense management system with approval workflow
And so on.
Each of these are projects with a project manager, but together they deliver a transformative change for the business. The overall change is managed as a programme, under a programme manager who will consolidate programme-level risks, manage resource conflicts across all projects, control the budget and work with business owners to realise the benefits across all the initiatives.
Programme management roles are often seen as a natural choice for project managers looking for their next challenge. As businesses get more strategic with project management and start aligning projects together into programmes of work, the need for skilled programme managers grows.
Programme management isn’t the same as managing projects and the skills you need are quite different. However, they are certainly aligned and many project managers successfully make the leap into the more strategic and higher-level role of managing a programme of work.
Skills for Programme Management
If you want to move into programme management, here are five skills you can develop during your time as project manager that will help you make the jump to programme level when the time comes.
1. Resource Management
In a programme management role there are lots of people, all playing important parts in keeping everything moving in the right direction. At project level you will be used to juggling the resource requirements around within your team so that you’ve got the right people doing the right things at the right time. On a programme, it’s a bigger pool of people.
You’ll have to look at the skills required to deliver the programme and work with project managers to resource the projects adequately. Then you might have to take decisions about where to deploy those staff members so that the work gets done in the most efficient way, even if that means taking someone off one project and temporarily asking them to work on another.
It’s a huge juggling act and can be quite time consuming. The experience you can build doing similar activities managing teams on projects will definitely help.
2. Stakeholder Engagement
Programmes have stakeholders, just like projects do. Hone your skills on your project and you’ll be well-placed to use them at programme level.
There is a lot more stakeholder engagement to do at a programme level as the pool of stakeholders is larger and generally people holding more senior roles in the organisation (in other words, there is more politics to deal with).
3. Business Acumen
Your programme is delivering some kind of change but there are parameters around that. Use your business acumen skills to understand the commercial aspects of the work beyond the scope of the IT work. You need to be able to think of your programme in the context of other business initiatives and consider the implications for spending money.
This is all about understanding the business case, challenging intelligently and thinking about the cash as if it was your own money on the line. There’s possibly also an element of contract negotiation and procurement that perhaps isn’t a big part of your project role. Finally, you’ll have to manage the programme budget, making sure each project and initiative is adequately financed.
4. Change Management
Programmes frequently include an
element of business as usual work, but mostly they are about changing
something. The constituent projects support the overall change the business is
looking for. Good
This is really about changing behaviour. Programme managers have to bring people along with them, encouraging them to see the vision and to understand why they are going on this journey. And deal with the inevitable resistance to your plans.
You might work alongside a change
manager who can handle these elements, but it’s still worth having a broad
understanding of
5. The Ability To Let Go
On smaller projects you probably understood a lot of the tasks in minute detail. If you came from a technical or subject matter expert background you might have got stuck doing some of the tasks as well. You can’t do that on a programme. First, you are too busy doing programme management and second you can’t be close enough to the project detail to be able to get hands on.
You have to acknowledge this and get comfortable with not knowing the minutiae of what is going on. Let it go. You have to trust your project managers and their teams to do what they need to do and to flag problems to you. You have to press on with the confidence that it’s all happening, even if you don’t know exactly what ‘it’ is.
Programme management isn’t your only choice if you are looking to move on from project management. Portfolio management roles or positions in the Project Management Office are also options. Those jobs often involve managing a team.
Line Management Roles
If you have more than a few project delivery people – business analysts, your project management office team, project managers, programme managers, that group needs a manager.
When I managed a team of project managers, it was a challenging job as you are dealing with a lot of line management issues that don’t come up on projects. For example, negotiating pay rises, doing annual appraisals. There’s coordination that needs to happen between team members, even if they aren’t working on the same programme, so you’re constantly looking for ways to support people and remove roadblocks so they can be more successful.
Leading a project management office or a team of project managers is a good step up, if you are prepared to lose some of your delivery responsibilities and take on a line role. Ultimately I decided it wasn’t for me because I prefer to deliver change rather than sign off expenses, but I know for many people it will feel like the natural next step. That opportunity is out there for you.
If you’ve got value from this training series and want to take the next step in your career, then let me tell you what I’ve got that can help.
Project and programme management can be a challenging job and a bit lonely at times, as often you are the only person working in a particular area. It’s great to know that we have ways to bring people together to share and learn from each other.
Project Management Rebels is a group membership and mentoring community. We go step by step through different strategies and techniques for helping you manage projects more successfully and with less stress.
You know the project management theory. You might have done training courses, read books, been managing projects for some time. In PM Rebels, what we show you how to make that knowledge work in real life, when you’re facing situations that aren’t covered in normal training. Like office politics, ethics, managing multiple projects, unrealistic stakeholder expectations. We help you take your PM knowledge to the next level.
Let me tell you about the things we have inside PM Rebels to help you juggle all your projects.
We have monthly deep dives. A deep dive is where we zone in on one particular topic. We try to get a grasp of a single topic each time. So we might cover managing multiple stakeholders, or dependency management, or handling difficult colleagues, or something like that.
Then we have office hours. That’s where I answer your questions. Email a question and let me make you a quick video to help you get unstuck.
We do a monthly group call. We get together on Zoom to discuss a topic, ask and answer questions and support each other. We brainstorm problems people are having on their projects and help people think through and move through whatever is causing them to be stuck on a project.
The group calls are what make PM Rebels great. I hope, once you’ve been part of one, you feel the same way. The group calls set us apart from all the other non-interactive training courses you might do. During the group calls we often focus on one person’s challenges for part of the call. But the cool thing is we all get to watch and listen, and contribute while it’s happening and to learn from the techniques and ideas that will help that person, because they can also help you too.
We also do Tool Talk. Tools are such a regular topic for discussion, so we look at tools and techniques that will help you on projects – not just specific software products, but templates, frameworks, techniques for doing your job and making it easier.
Great, so that’s what PM Rebels is. We normally run a cohort for 6 months, and you might find we do other things, like extra webinars or get togethers, but the primary core part of PM Rebels are our deep dives, our office hours, the group calls and the tool talks.
You can also find and connect with other Rebels through our dedicated, members-only Facebook group.
So that is PM Rebels! If you’ve got any questions, drop me an email and I’ll help you work out if the group is right for you. I hope to see you inside.
Whether you decide to be part of that or not, welcome to our little part of the internet. I can’t wait to help you take the next step in your career as a project manager.