Program Management: The Umbrella That Aligns Technology with Strategy

How do you know that you need Salesforce? Or PowerBI? Or that AI-enabled marketplace add-in? Should we consolidate those systems to save money? Do we need so many seats?

My view is that the list of projects to start, stop or continue springs from looking at the business strategy and comparing where we are with where we want to be.

And those projects shouldn't all be technology projects:

• We need to do work to support people as they adopt new ways of working.
• Information generated by digital systems needs to make its way into the hands of the people who can use it to make decisions.

Sure, we do need to get to domain-specific projects, but there are some golden rules that are common across all programs, large and small:

• Clarify the goals and the basic building blocks needed to achieve them
• Clarify what success looks like
• Make sure the right people are aligned and engaged with the effort

These are the sort of considerations that create successful outcomes. These days, the implementation of the technology itself is less of a risk, it is more about what we are doing with it.

This is why Program Management should be seen as an overarching umbrella. The domain-specific elements just map into it.

Why is this essential?

Here are some examples in play today:

• A large organization resetting its CRM implementation after considerable spend in order to better link the implementation approach to the goals of the business. The board had lost confidence in the current direction
• A very small charity using real-time analytics on sources of revenue to understand how to configure its legal entities and internal cashflows

• A very large organization forced by vendor EOL to move off their current CRM Service platform taking the opportunity to step back and define their service modernization goals before reimplementing

Each of these examples demonstrates the need to fundamentally tie back to the question "what are we doing this for?"

And when teams know the answer to that then every other decision becomes clearer and efforts are more focussed.

That is why I deliver my domain-specific services through the lens of strategic program management.

The real question for leaders is not just which tools to implement, but how to structure programs so that each initiative reinforces the others.

I regularly explore these ideas at fieldenablement.com and my blog .

Gareth