The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - From Tactics to Strategy - Stepping Up from Project to Program Manager | Foundations Friday 70

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

In From Tactics to Strategy: Stepping Up as a Program Manager I share advice I gave someone in the r/Project Management to a Project Manager moving up to doing Program Manager level work."Sooo, you're now going to do more strategic work and your focus should be at the 30k ft. level, not the 100ft level. Make sense?My $.02 for free:Do you have PMs for each project?If so, ask them to help shore up the information you needIf not, KISSGather what I call the "Foundational 5" of Leader/Sponsor's intent, objectives, team organization structure, resources and communications plans for each projectTo track at a program level you need a list (MS Teams, Excel, Jira, etc.)Suggested list headingsProject NamePhase (Discovery, Design, QA/Testing, Deployment, Complete or Cancelled)Estimated % complete (0, 25, 50, 75 or 100)Primary workstream/swimlane/categoryOwnerStatus (Not Started, In Progress, On Hold, Complete)Priority (High, Medium, Low)Due/Go Live Date"Have a plan, stay informed and get involved,KevinKevin Pannell, PMP | Creator & Host KEV Talks Podcast

Morning, everybody. Today, KevTalks program management. So why am I talking about this? I'm pretty active on the project management subreddit. So check that out. It's KevTalksPod. And I also have a KevTalksPod subreddit where I post episodes and things. But a question I've seen a lot is, hey, I'm new. I got my PMP. But now I'm doing either a higher level of project management or even program management. And so I answered a question for somebody recently and really one, I was kind of sarcastic saying, you mean the PMP didn't instantly prepare you to do program management in real life? Sarcasm, right? Because as I said before, PMP is great professional credential to kind of have

on your resume, but also it's a thing you study for and take a test for but it doesn't necessarily at least the old school one i took not the newer one get you ready for doing what you need to do in the real world all the time and so that's where advice from others comes from i know i've learned a lot from advice so my feedback was so now program management, right? You're not at 100 foot down in the weeds sometimes looking at individual tasks quite as much. You're at 30,000 foot where you have to look at multiple projects across an entire program. So if that's the case, if you're fortunate enough to have project managers for each of the different projects in the program, ask them, right?

Ask them what information you need. I actually find myself in a similar situation, you know, get the who, where, what, when, why, how kind of stuff from each project or the foundational five, as you know. So find out what's the leader's intent for each project. What are the objectives for each project? What's the organization? What resources do they have? And how are they communicating?

In addition to that, to be able to pull together a program level report for each project, my suggestion is to track on something, whether it's Teams, Excel, Jira, SharePoint, whatever. There's so many different tools. Monday.com, and I'm not sponsored by any of these jams. Just something, right? And I suggest the following heading. So what's the project's name? What phase is it in? The phases I've used that I think are helpful. Is it in discovery? We're just figuring out what's going on. Is it design? Are they designing how they're going to do things? Is it in QA testing? Deployment, completed or canceled? And these are just really basic ones. The next thing is estimate the percent complete and just keep it simple 0 25 50 75 or 100 what's

the primary work stream slash swim lane slash category like what does this live under who owns it right so who's the owner of this project which could be you know you could split that out maybe a little bit more to who's the pm and who's the sponsor what's the status again keeping it simple it's not started it's in progress it's on hold or it's complete what's the sponsor? What's the status? Again, keeping it simple. It's not started. It's in progress. It's on hold or it's complete. What's the priority? High, medium, low, low, medium, high. Again, very simple. And then what's the due date or go live date for the project? Probably go live date's better. So this way, if you have, let's say seven projects underneath the program that you're helping lead, then you can get a quick snapshot, right? And you can talk to these and you can dive down to these with your teams. But when you go to program management level,

remember you're at 30,000 feet, you're not at a hundred feet. So you're not going to be managing individual tasks. You're going to managing whole projects and leading people that are leading those projects. So if you're program managing or senior project managing at a high level, this is where we learn to stay strategic and not get sucked into the tactical. Thanks so much for listening to KevTalks. Remember, KevTalksPod.com is the hub. All the connections, subscriptions, follows you can do from there. I'm at PenelKG, though, if you want to follow on Twitter and Instagram.

And again, KevTalksPod, subreddit, or follow me on the Reddit. Thanks so much. Remember, have a plan, stay informed, and get involved. For now, I gotta fly.