Tracking a Program

A program has the same key management areas as a project and each one has additional aspects to consider given the larger scope and impact. We’ll touch on each of these key management areas:

• Program planning

• Risk management

• Stakeholder management

Program planning

Regardless of how the program came to be, the key requirements in the planning stage remain the same. The reason that a program exists is to facilitate multiple projects in achieving a common set of goals. The most important step for a program is to define a common set of goals.

If the program is being created from the beginning and no project has started, this is a straightforward task because the requirements as a whole will tell what the end goals will be. Each project would then take a subset of these requirements to form its own goals. In the case of the Mercury program, the requirements stated that the Mercury application needed to be available to $90\%$ of the user base. This became the goal of the program, and the projects took the subset of requirements needed for their given operating system.

When the program is being formed from projects that have already begun, this exercise can be a bit more abstract. This is because it is easy to assign items into known categories and yet hard to determine what categories should be given to those same items.

Let’s pretend that the Mercury program ...