Why are programs initiated? As per PMI’s PMBOK6 Guide, a program is initiated to obtain strategic benefits. What does that mean? Watch this video to understand how programs bring about benefits to an organization.
The Program is defined as a group of related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities that are managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits that you wouldn’t otherwise get if you were to manage these projects individually.
Programs have at least two projects so it can’t be just one project has to be at least two projects or more, and it could also even have operational activities and when programs are initiated there are typically initiated for some sort of a benefit that the organization needs and that benefit is usually measured in the form of a KPI a key performance indicator.
For example, a program would be a program to elevate the rank of a school among its competitors or university is trying to rank higher amongst other universities. There is no project that is going to give the university a higher rank for the university to rank higher. They would need to work on different areas number one the curriculum so that’s you know defining or designing curriculums would be one criteria, another thing they may want to look at is the qualification of their lecturers, another one they may look at is location or facilities that they have which is a construction project.
They may want to look at an IT project may be digitizing content or using smart boards or other technologies at the university, they may also need to consider financial matters, and offer maybe incentives of programs for students.
They also may want to look at the mix of the students they may want to look at partnerships that they would have to create with some other organizations, and there’s probably a few others so if you think about it there’s a lot of different initiatives of different flavors and natures that the university would have to in order for it to rank higher, and even when it does all of the things that we just mentioned.
It does not mean that the university is going to rank higher right then so a project typically you go and hand over and it gets inspected and they would sign off and it’s all done on a program you deliver all of the components as in the example of the University and you wait it out for like six months or one year and record the difference so after one year whatever assessment was done to rank the University when we do it after one year we should hopefully get a better result because we have built in all of the components required to rank higher so that’s one example of a program.
