Program Charter & Management

It is symantically important to understand the difference between a Program & a Project. Projects are all rolled-up into an overarching Program as seen in the following example:

• Program Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) Roll-out 
  • Project1 Demographic Analysis 
  • Project2 Product development (analysis & definition) 
  • Project3 Wireless Radio Access Network (RAN) design & deployment 
  • Project4 Network Operating Center (NOC) design & deployment 
  • Project5 Points of Presence (POP) designs & deployment 
  • Project6 Customer Premises equipment (CPE) design
  • ...
  • ...

Each program on your roadmap should start with a charter that gives your expectations & success factors for the project. In addition to its value as a planning tool, the project charter provides much of the input to the statement of work/service level agreements (SLA) & provides the foundation required for effective project management.

The program charter includes:

• An explicit statement of the program scope, assumptions, and constraints
• A project justification statement detailing:
  • How the program aligns with and advances your corporate strategy
  • The success factors for the program & each subsequent project & how they will be tracked & measured
• A cost-benefits analysis that includes the project budgets & full exposure of all hidden costs
• An organizational plan that gives the composition, roles, & responsibilities (see RACI, left) of your onshore & offshore project teams
• A requirements management plan that details how requirements are to be created & shared with the offshore team
• A change management plan for all aspects of the project including requirements, scope, transition, & project logistics
• All resource requirements for the projects including the version control system, bug tracking system, & other required software licenses & hardware
• A communication plan that details:
  • The schedule of all regular meetings, their agendas, & the required attendees
  • The communication channels to be used & how communications will be tracked
  • All status reporting & feedback mechanisms
• A training plan consisting of:
  • The knowledge transfer plan and content
  • The cultural intelligence training programs for the onshore & offshore project teams
• A work breakdown plan for all stages of all projects including requirements definition, design, development, quality assurance, delivery & acceptance testing
• A detailed risk assessment & mitigation plan. A high-level view of this should already reside in the strategic assessment
• The quality assurance plan detailing:
  • The criteria, methods & procedures to be used to control quality during development, integration testing & acceptance testing
  • How defects are to be tracked & communicated between the teams
  • A review process that enables each team to benefit from improvements discovered by the other
• The project schedule with explicit, measurable milestones

The Program charter provides a framework for managing the projects. The program manager is charged with ensuring that the project teams adhere to all of its provisions & that all project milestones are met. Some aspects of the charter, especially requirements definition & change management, require special attention. Even experienced project managers may need mentoring & guidance from the Program Management to successfully make the transition to globally distributed development & delivery.