Alas, I am old enough to remember when there was some confusion about programs, portfolios, and multi-project management, a fog which has at least partly cleared thanks to the Project Management Institute’s continuing work on standardizing the terminology and developing standards for the various roles related to “management by projects” (or the organizational elevation of project management). However, it is interesting to see the welter of definitions for a program that are out there, for example in the PM Glossary compiled by Max Wideman. One gets the impression that a program is whatever an individual company says it is; and the program manager role description is a moving target. When we developed the role descriptions in our book, we looked at hundreds of actual job descriptions. Here’s part of what we included on the Program Manager:

Role Overview

In large organizations with many project managers, project managers may be awarded “grades” based on their span of control. This position manages complex, strategic projects that span organizational boundaries, so Program Managers should have experience managing multiple high-risk projects, including projects involving external vendors and multiple business areas. This grade is a logical training ground for Manager of Project Managers, Manager of Project Support, Strategic Project Office Director, and CPO positions for the program manager with business acumen. When groups of related projects are organized into programs, this position may manage multiple project managers whose projects provide specific deliverables; all which must be collectively managed to provide the desired programmatic results.

Whew. As I read that I am reminded of the Cat in the Hat, who boasted he could “fan with my tail while I hop on a ball/ and that is not all! …” But seriously, as we have seen the PMO grow in stature and span of influence, those with program management skills have increasingly been in demand. They have the skills, honed in the coordination of many conflicting priorities, issues, and personalities, to assist a PMO Director in pursuing multiple objectives, each with its project or fleet of projects. It’s a natural training ground for the Portfolio Manager … and may even be the Portfolio Manager in all but name.

Here’s a great article about the Program Manager role by one of our PMO of the Year judges.

And, speaking of the PMO of the Year; check back here on March 2 for an announcement of this year’s application process, and links to the contest materials.

Our PMO Award winner and finalists had their day in the sun in Boston, and the brief case studies of their achievements have been posted on the PM Solutions website, for those of you who weren’t able to be with us at the awards ceremony.

It’s an interesting thing about these case studies; this is the fourth year we have sponsored this award, and each year I’ve pulled together a story from the application materials, checked with the PMO Director, and gone straight to press with it … oh, but how things have changed in 2009!

This year each of the case studies went though more than one level of review at the PMOs’ companies - from legal to PR, and up the chain to VPs of various stripes, our humble few pages of copy were vetted, critiqued, corrected and revised. At first this just frustrated me, but then I realized: for the first time in the award’s history, the upper echelons actually care what is being said about the PMO.

And that, my friends, is progress.

Yet … weigh in here, project managers … although PMs have for decades said they wanted greater visibility in the organization and more executive involvement … now that this is a reality in many companies, I’d bet that visibility is a two-edged sword. Yes, you get the praise and maybe even the funding you deserve. But the presentation of Paul Ritchie’s quoted in yesterday’s post from Kent Crawford tells another side of the story: visibility also means being held accountable for our lapses, and scrutinized on factors we perhaps had not even thought of.

I’ll be interested to hear from those of you who find themselves visible … and nervous … as well as those who are basking in the spotlight.

Eavesdropping on the attendees at the CBP Summit here in sunny Cambridge, Mass yielded the following gems:

“Project management is like a ‘black art’ to the executives … no one understands how it works. They kind of want it but are scared of it at the same time.”

“This merger is a little different, because they are keeping the team intact…”

“I worked in the space program, but never built a rocket; worked in the computer industry but never designed a chip … project management is transferable. It’s like Jack Welch said: he never made a lightbulb at GE but he was a great CEO.”

“If I were naming PMI today, I think I’d name it something different. The People Management Institute. The Process Management Institute. The Performance Management Institute. The focus on the project makes us blind to the larger issues.”

“We’re looking for predictable outcomes … instead of the ‘project black hole’.”

“My company is back in the 80s. How do you fast-forward through project management into strategic management-by-projects?”

… It’s exciting - but also daunting - to hear the recipients of the PMO of the Year awards describe what they’ve done - and the speed with which some of the improvements were implemented. Stay tuned for some brief interviews with the Award winner and the finalists later today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have an answer for that last question: we are all ears.

We’ve selected the 2009 PMO of the Year from a field of nearly 40 applicants that included state and federal agencies, major nonprofit organizations, and an impressive field of Fortune 1000 companies. In the end, the top ten differed in the rankings by mere tenths of a percentage point. and only five could be selected:

Rockwell Automation’s Software Program Management Office is the 2009 PMO of the Year. Founded in 2004, the PMO, within the Architecture and Software Group, ramped up rapidly, assured certification (multiple certifications in many cases) of all PMO staff, and deployed an agile methodology that has allowed them to deliver major releases on time and under cost for the first time in the organization’s history. Bravo to the Rockwell PMO Staff and its director, James C. Brown!

The four finalists who will also be honored at the awards ceremony in Boston on May 19 are:

Alcatel-Lucent’s Global Program Management Office

Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) Project Management Office

Cisco Services Office of Strategy and Planning

Regence Blue Cross-Blue Shield Enterprise Program Management Office.

Detailed information about the winner and all finalists will be posted on our website, www.cbponline.com, within the week. At the CBP Strategy & Projects Summit, which kicks off with the Awards reception on May 19, representatives of Rockwell Automation will present the facts that make their organization a winner, and representatives of the finalists will be on hand as well to field questions and share expertise. We hope to see you there.

One of my favorite scenes in movie history is from The Lion in Winter, which takes place at Christmas in the castle where Henry II (Peter O’Toole) has imprisoned his uppity spouse Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn). In the midst of a raging domestic battle over the king’s mistress and his succession plans for their three sons, Hepburn winds up lying on the floor. “Ah, well,” she says in a calm, philosophical tone, her cheek on the threshold. “What family doesn’t have its little ups and downs?”

Well, it’s Christmas time again, and members of the global family we call “the economy” are having our ups and downs. Mostly downs, you might say, And yet - speedreading the headlines in the various business and tech newsletters arriving daily in my inbox, I’m getting the sense that, at the same time that certain aspects of our economic life are darkening and dwindling, other aspects are getting ready to come into their own.

Case in point: Management Consulting News reports in its December 2 edition on the generally lousy state of the ten top publicly-traded consulting firms the organization tracks. No surprise there; but wait - there’s one exception:

Of the companies in the MCNews Index, only Hewitt has managed to hold onto a gain in its stock price over the period of the last two years. From the inception of the Index in January 2007, Hewitt’s stock price has gained almost 6.0 percent, while all of the remaining companies face heavy losses in their stock values.

What interests me about this fact is that Hewitt, alone among all the other companies in the MCNews Index, has been a finalist in our PMO of the Year Award competition. Their innovative management of information technology globally and their application of project management problem-solving techniques to the challenges of going public are described in the 2008 awards program. Since I don’t much believe in coincidence; I’m betting that great project and portfolio management has allowed this HR outsourcing and consulting firm to do the things that less-savvy businesses are now scrambling to implement: resource optimization, portfolio management, aligning strategy with action via projects. None of these processes can be well managed without a PMO, so companies that hope to thrive in lean times should take a leaf from Hewitt’s notebook.

A few years ago I attempted to map the high-performing organizations in our Strategy & Projects study to available financial metrics. It turned out to be impossible, as the companies ranged from big nonprofits to small close-held consultancies; from government agencies to the Fortune 500, so no common metric could be found. But, what I did find when I Googled their names was a string of superlatives along the lines of:

Winner of the 2005 Best Place to Work Award!

Professional Services Company of the Year!

Customer Service Award!

Regional Poll Says We Are Tops in Patient Care!

… and so on. That’s when I knew that our instincts about the bottom-line effects of managing by projects were correct. Now, I’m thinking that economic collapse is the perfect environment for project management to prove that executing strategy as a portfolio of projects, balancing resources wisely across the portfolio, eliminating rework and duplication, and so on, will be the differentiator between organizational success and freefall.

Going up?