OVERVIEW

Business leaders are in the heat of competitive battles.  To win, they must develop their products, services and infrastructure capabilities in a fast, repeatable and integrated fashion.  “Program Management for Improved Business Results” provides professionals with a fundamental knowledge of the program management discipline and how to implement it to manage their development efforts.

A holistic view of the program management discipline is presented. This includes describing program management as a critical business function (the business level) that can be used to gain competitive advantage, as well as describing how a program should be managed (the program level) to produce maximum business results.  Both the business level and the program level elements covered in the book are based upon real practices by real people in real companies.  The concepts presented have been developed through the authors’ extensive experience as program management professionals across multiple industries, academic research within companies, and benchmarking activities and interviews with industry representatives at all levels of the organization.

This breakthrough book provides a practical description of program management; a blueprint for organizational transition to program management; an explanation of the primary roles and core competencies of the program manager; and a how-to approach that is based on a strong business focus and systems view – two fundamental characteristics of the program management discipline.  In doing so, the authors describe how many of today’s business leaders use the program management discipline to gain competitive advantage over their rivals by:

- Managing increased product and process complexity

- Aligning execution activities to business strategy

- Mitigating business risk to maximize ROI

- Leading highly distributed development teams

- Accelerating time to money performance