Today’s organisations are subject to continual change. There are many different drivers for this change including technology advances, mergers and acquisitions, continual process improvement, legislation and policy changes. The rate of change is increasing and therefore organisations need to learn how to transform themselves through effective leadership and strategic control.
Programme Management is becoming more and more popular as a key tool to help organisations deliver change and manage the transformation. The Cabinet Office (part of HM Government) has produced a guide for Best Practice Programme Management. Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) has recently been updated to reflect latest thinking to deliver change and focus on the outcomes. MSP is the globally recognised best practice approach to programme management.
What is a Programme? When asked what a programme is, many people think of a programme just as ‘a set of projects’ This is just part of the definition, as programme managers will be focussing not just on the series of projects and the inter-dependencies between them, but on the outcomes the projects deliver to achieve the end goal. In other words, the benefits.
According to MSP a programme is defined as ‘a temporary, flexible organisation created to coordinate, direct and oversee the implementation of a set of related projects and activities in order to deliver outcomes and benefits related to the organisations strategic objectives’.
MSP gives us a common framework for leading and managing all programmes because it is principles-based. The MSP Framework consists of three core concepts. Principles, Governance Themes and the transformational flow.
This is the first in a series looking at the principles and how they should be applied in a programme environment.
PM-Partners group offer training workshops in the APMG's Managing Successful Programmes (MSP®). See our website for further details. MSP is a registered trademark of the Cabinet Office.
