1 Introduction

This report is produced to discuss the muti-project and programme environment. Leadership and risk management in programme management is considered. The academic resource is referenced to support the argument of influence of a leader to the programme team and the impact of risk to the programme. Both issued are answered considering the programme management exercise on the module. Although the term “programme” is used frequently, the in module exercise is a portfolio management which consists of a group of programmes and several projects.

2 Programme Team Leadership

This section discusses the leadership characteristics of a successful programme manager compared to the project manager and effective influence of a programme manager to their programme team for programme success. The programme management exercise is referenced to compare the influence within our programme team.

2.1 Leadership

It is argued that programmes are qualitatively different from projects. A successful programme manager have to demonstrate the leadership with a higher, more comprehensive perspective than project managers in order to lead project teams as one. Therefore, some leadership characteristics can be common from both programme managers and project managers, but a successful programme managers may require more leadership characteristics than a project manager does. 

Sowden (2011) defines that a programme manager is responsible for the design of the programme team, appointment of the programme office, appointment of project teams, ensure all roles are clear defined with responsibilities, management of the programme lifecycle, efficiency of resources. All these works are issue of people, which reflects that leadership is essential for a successful Programme Manager.

Leadership characteristics

Leadership is the process represents a person with certain values and resources motives followers to realize the goal (Burns, 1978). Leaders therefore are described as people who tend to be visionary, intrinsically motivated and charismatic, and demonstrate excellent communication skills. According to Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994), a leader is someone who can make others set personal objectives aside for pursuing a new goal contributing to a common objective. With these understanding of leadership, it can be argued that a successful leadership in programme and project management should be able to lead a comprehensive team with individual team members and perform better than individual effort would do.

It is believed that a good leader would motivate and empower members to recognize and complete the works necessary for the desired outcome instead of managing or mandating every action and task. Effective leadership appear generally when some features are demonstrated by a project team, for example, open communication, clear lines of responsibility, team performance is exceeding expectation (Bojeun, 2013). These can not be generated without a leader successfully conducting exceptional team building, turning conflicts from negative to innovative, to bring out the best of a team.

Similarities and Differences

As a collection of projects, programme management requires different abilities of a manager. The definition of programme management is proposed by Association for Project Management (2006):

Programme management is the coordinated management of related projects, which may include related business-as-usual activities that together achieve a beneficial change of a strategic nature for an organisation.

(APM Body of Knowledge, p.3)

Programs are the outcomes of a new result created through the culmination of multiple projects, operational efforts, and process change that serves as a part of benefit delivery with other programmes or projects (PMI, 2013). With these understanding of programmes, it seems that programme managers have to know not only how to apply project management but also how to ensure the ultimate benefit for the organisation.

Although it seems that the requirements of progrmme managers differ from those of project managers, some leadership characteristics are identical to both roles. To a successful program manager, the programs need to be ensured that they are in alignment with the organizational strategic benefits, it is expected that the programme manager have the ability of communicating effectively with both stakeholders and team members to drive high team performance, managing all efforts in consistent approaches (Bojeun, 2013). The similarity of successful programme managers and project managers is that both of them demonstrate leadership to motivate team members work toward a common goal. Because a project team consists of members from a variety of departments, and a programme team is a collection of diverse project teams, it is through leadership that all members could come together and strive for success. Whether programme managers or project managers, good abilities of communicating and empowering that drive efforts to the team goal are indispensable to a successful leader.

While there are some similar attributes can be identified from programme managers and project managers, there are certain differences between them. Lock and Scott (2013) suggest that Projects are a group of lower-level packages of work which are composed of discrete smaller tasks, and Programmes to certain extent are similar for they are an amalgamation of projects and other activities. Programme management represent increasing level of project’s scope and complexity.

Project managers drive the creation of a single achievement which is defined objectives for the effort. Although they may be aware of overall benefits of the programme, they tend to focus on the deliverables of projects. On the other hand, programme management is managing multiple projects and operational efforts to integrate the needs of each project as one complete plan for realising the benefits of the programme. Establishing a clear vision is vital for programme managers to communicate with both stakeholders and teams. Benefit management and stakeholder management are conventional means that programme managers adopt to make stakeholders consistently conscious of long term benefits for the organisation.

Table 2.1.1 Leadership characteristics comparison of Programme Manager and Project Manager

2.2 The Influence of Programme Managers

It is proposed that one way of earning leadership as a programme manager is building influence on the programme team. The influence exchanges a programme manager’s offer for commitments from programme team and stakeholders, and maintains relationships with them (Kendrick, 2012). Every team undergo five stages of team development, and reach its full potential in the stage of Performing. A programme manager can influence the programme team to facilitate the process from Forming to Performning through open communication, positive conflict resolution and empowerment (Bojeun, 2013).

1. Forming

2. Storming

3. Norming

4. Performing

5. Adjourning

Table 2.2.1 Five stages of team development (Bruce Tuchman, 1965)

Regardless of the size or scope, programme success is always defined as fulfillment of program benefits, which is finished in the arranged period of time and under the planned budget. Scope, schedule, and budget are three critical constraints of any program (PMI, 2013). Programme success requires well-planned resource management to overcome the constraints, which highly depend on the level of coordination of programme team members. A programme won’t be successful without the commitments of participated team members. Curlee and Gordon (2013) argue a good leader who generate greater commitment to roles will flourish and that successful leaders funnel trust to meet the needs of the programme. If a programme manager can combine time, belief, credibility, understanding and respect, a manner built with trust can influence the entire programme. Therefore, a programme manager must understand how to get commitments from all programme members in order to motivate them work for team success. Different situation calls for different measure. To effectively influence a programme team for progrmme success, the programme manager must understand what influence strategies can be adopted to influence the teams.

Influences Strategies

Guy discussed styles of influence and corresponding strategies on MMPE module, each of which can be implemented depends on the nature of different leaders.

Friendliness

This strategy emphasizes that the friendly attitude to others matters, and the leader should be sensitive to others’ feeling. Making others feel they are valued and creating the sense of participation for them through making their job sound important is the example of deploying this strategy. This style can be highly productive especially when the recipient seeks recognition

Bargaining

It is the strategy referred to as negotiation, which based on the exchange of principles and deals. Concessions and compromises can be made and people may be reminded of past favours. The strength is bargaining with opinion leaders, who have major impact on the team’s thinking, to influence other members.

Reasoning

This strategy aims to present facts, information to support arguments and avoid emotional appeal. It is a strategy with high potential for success, but best used in conjunction with other strategies.

Assertiveness

Being pushy and aggressive is the main feature of this strategy. Influencer may reference to rules and regulations or time deadline. If it does not cause antagonism, this strategy may be appropriate. Generally, people who are strongly determined and would prepared to comprise working relationships use this strategy.

Upward Appeal

It refers to getting higher position in the chain of command in order to obtain support for the influencer. Most of the results of this strategy are negative. Therefore, it is suggested as a secondary strategy to be used only when others attempted before have failed.

Coalition

It is a political strategy which use other people for support, rounds up support informally and influences decision making in formal meetings. The influencer can be in strong position if the support of the right people, who create and maintain opinions, is won.

Sanctions

It is reported that this strategy almost always causes adverse effect on future cooperation, so it is not suggested for a programme manager who will like to influence the team for programme success effectively.

2.3 The Programme Management Exercise

A leader of a programme needs to understand his or her leadership style and how it can influence the programme team. The programme manager must have the confidence in himself and the team to resolve the complexity and chaos. There were four programme managers who run our programme in turn on the programme management exercise. Each of them demonstrated the different influence style to manage the programme team.

The first programme manager in the initial phase is Stone with an influence style of friendliness. He was trying to be friendly to every team members and sensitive to other’s feeling. It is normal that every team took longer time to make decision because everything is highly uncertain in the beginning. However, because the atmosphere of our programme team was somewhat intense, Stone gave a long inspiring speech after the exercise talking about how much everyone is valued and important for programme team success. Although some project teams were frustrated by the day one exercise, the emotional speech of Stone did motivate all members to be confident in the next day exercise.

Victor is a leader of reasoning style who demonstrates strong logical-thinking when he tries to influence the project teams. Every time he has a good idea to suggest, he always proposes it with valid information on hand. Because Victor was not an emotional leader, his style tranquilized the programme team to perform smoothly. He was such a positive manager that he understood the progress of each team and realised what are main obstacles suffering the project team. The project members tend to ask him for advice and support naturally.

Diego is a leader of bargaining style who negotiate with others based on exchange of deal. When a project team asked assemblers or testers to be allocated, Diego would request the project team to compromise for other teams. He can identify the opinion leader within the programme team and influence other’s opinion during the programme meeting to reach an agreement. The last leader Poyee is coalition style. In the last period, Thailand team realizes that they would inevitably deliver the project late. There are some conflicts on decisions when our programme team together attempted to reduce the delay days as much as possible. Poyee led the decisions-making through acquiring the support from a part of project leaders first, then dominated the final decision in the formal meeting.

In summary, leadership can influence others through a range of strategies. Leadership is a highly personal matter that defines how a leader influences the followers. Regardless of what defines a successful manager, a great leader who lead by actions will be instantly recognized by others.

3 Project and Programme Risk Management

This section discusses how project risks have an impact on programme risks considering a typical risk management Process. The programme management exercise is referenced to discuss how the programme risks were managed considering the impact of the project risks for different types of risk. Finally, the perspective of how project and programme risk management could have been improved on the exercise is provided.

3.1 The Impact of Project Risks on Programme Risks

The right people, the right processes and the right supporting technology are essential for a programme to be successful. They are also vital in achieving successful risk management at programme level and above. For successful risk management, processes need to be designed for people, and the technology needs to be designed for both processes and people. Nowadays, risk management is necessary for project management success. It leads us to focus on the uncertainty which exists in the future and develop corresponding plans of action. It is aim to mitigate the risks of the project through preventing potential issues from becoming problems.

According to Kerzner (2013), risk is a measure of the possibility of not achieving the defined project objective. It is agreed that risk should involve the notion of uncertainty. People understanding the significance of risks to a project or a programme, yet it is still not always easy to evaluate risks. Because it is difficult to measure the probability and the consequence of occurrence directly, risks are often estimated through judgment, statistical, or other procedures. It is defined by Kerzner (2013) that risk management is the act or practice of dealing with risk. The process consists of five stages, planning for risk, identifying risks, analyzing risks, developing risk response strategies, and monitoring and controlling risks, that determines how risk have changed. Risk management is one aspect of robust project management that should not be assigned to a risk management department and regarded as a separate project office activity.

            Levin (2013) suggests that effective programme management has been recognized as a key success factor to drive business benefit by many executives and business leaders in a variety of industries. Basically, it is impossible that effective programme management’ can be realised while risk management is separated. Therefore, effective programme management must be conducted with effective risk management. It requires the project teams within the programme to manage risks seriously which makes projects are more likely to succeed, and the programme is more likely to succeed as a consequence. Managing risk is such a significant work that it should not be regarded as the responsibility of only the project managers or the program manager. Instead it should be implemented by every person in every level of a programme team.

Risk Management Process

Without an accurate assessment of risk, the programme manager is treading on dangerous territory. It is important that establish a risk management strategy early in a programme to continually address risk throughout the programme life cycle. While there are different descriptions of risk management model, the one most typical example in programme management is the risk management process which is proposed by Project Management Institute in the A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. The process is detailed with five indispensable procedures, risk planning, risk identifying, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, response planning, and risk monitoring and controlling (PMI, 2013).

Risk Planning is the process of developing a comprehensive strategy for managing risk. It defines how to execute all risk management activities. The planning activity should be included in the overall programme management plan. In regard to project risk, the programme team may consider what work can be a risk to the programme, who to take care of it, when to report the progress and how to manage it effectively.

Identifying risk is the process of determining which risks could affect the programme and documenting their characteristics. This activity should get everyone on the programme be involved in the risk identification. A programme manager may ask each project team to participate in risk identification for both projects and the programme, and appoint or hire a risk manager to guide the process.

Qualitative analysis is the “process of prioritizing risks for further analysis” (PMI, 2013, p289). After risks are identified, all risks should be captured on the risk register for the programme team to perform the qualitative analysis. The probability and impact of the risks need to be updated on the risk register. This activity is suggested to be performed throughout the programme life cycle.

Quantitative analysis is the action of quantifying the impact of risks could cause to the programme through numeric analysis. Because this process is timely and resource-intensive one, the quantitative analysis is better to be used only for the most significant risks which may influence the programme. If risks just have low possibilities of occurrence or low impact to the programme, it is not suggested to use resources for conducting quantitative analysis on them.

Response planning is implementing one or more options and actions in response to identified risks to mitigate them. It is important that each risk should be assigned to a risk owner who is responsible for it. The risk owner must ensure the execution of the risk response and decide when is appropriate time to close the risk in the register. The type of response options can be acceptance, avoidance, mitigation and transfer. A specific approach of implementation has to be developed according to the chosen option, and resources must be allocated to the risk response plan. The programme manager has to decide how much budget and which personnel are necessary to respond the risks.

Monitoring and controlling risks is an iterative and ongoing process when the risk is systematically tracked for the programme. The process consists of several main works, including tracking risks, implementing responses actions, identifying new risks, and monitoring the residual and secondary risks to the programme. In regard to project risks that affect the programme, the programme manager should hold regular meetings with project teams to discuss the situation of identified risk. The programme team can update response plan after assessing the performance of risk response actions.

3.2 The Programme Management Exercise

Morris and Pinto (2007) proposes that programme risks generally are classified into three categories:

Programme risks

Risks that can directly affect the programme and are controlled at the programme level.

Aggregated risks

Project risks that are commonly faced by more than one project team. They are considered from the view of programme level. The response action can be response of project team with support of programme management, or response of programme management with follow-up of project team.

Project risks

Risks that have impact only on one project.

During the Programme management exercise, the first thing our team did for effective risk management is making everyone be aware of the risks that may appear based on the experience from the last exercise. A risk manager was nominated on the programme level to provide the information of risks of particular activities. It was believed by our programme team that the risk management strategy is much better and effective when effort is made for close examination of risk response. The regular meetings were held after every period to discuss risks that every project team would encounter in the following period. The programme manager asked what the decision of the project team would made in response to the risk, and debate how could it be better for other project team resources and overall programme success.

Supplier risks are identified as aggregated risks, and therefore the possibility and impact on programme level are analysed. The strategy for choosing subcontractors and manufacturers of our team is considering the suppliers with quality above the average. It is recognized that we would rather spend more budget on reliable suppliers than take the risk of works failing. To effectively manage the decision making on supplier selection, our programme team record which supplier is chosen by the leading team, UK team and China team, and what are the performance of those suppliers. For example, how many days did they took to finish the work and what are the percentages that they failed on completing the works? The information was detailed in a standard document that was always used to assist the rest teams for selecting the suppliers. This measure provided benefits when one project team chose a supplier that is different from other team did, the project team would get notification that they were making a risky action. Furthermore, it was much efficient for project teams to reference the information for selecting suppliers since they were not just making decision totally depends on their intuition and conjecture. As a result, all effort contributed to the performance of the programme in terms of controlling budget and schedule.

On the other hand, project risks such as, the allocation of designers for design activities, are identified as well. Since the amount of designer available for every project team was varying in different period, each team had to plan what is the best way to utilize their resources in order to deliver the project on time. Some team that started with relatively sufficient designers were asked to complete the design activities as early as possible, which was a risk response to executing activities with insufficient designers in the following period. The other team were requested to commence non-designed activities in the beginning phase. Although project teams adopted different strategy, the risk responses were all implemented in order to reduce the impact of risks to each project.

3.3 Improvement of Risk Management on The Exercise

While much effort was done by our programme team for risk management, some more endeavor can be undertaken to reduce serious impact and improve risk management. In reality, it is better to understand and assess suppliers and manufacturers before the subcontracting the works. In any project, the perception of the participant about his or her responsibilities, which depends on their capability and experience, will affect how the project is undertaken (Morris, P. and Pinto, J. 2007). The risk management could be improved if our programme team were able to have contractual requirements that make suppliers take the responsibilities for certain project risks, or engage in their own risk management.

In the programme management exercise, Nigeria team and Pakistan team experienced the failure on the supplier activities. Both team did not chose the suppliers with top quality although it is known that there was a risk of failure on the activities. The initial thought is that both team planned to save money from supplier activities to make more profits on the project. However, the impact of failed work had not been considered that caused the unexpected delay on original schedule. The situation could be improved through effective communication. If the programme manager and risk manager had noticed that Nigeria team and Pakistan team were taking the risk of not choosing top quality supplier for the activity with the most probability of failure, they should have suggested or insisted the project team not to do so. Neglect the possible impact of the risk may lead to the schedule was the serious mistake that can not tolerated in effective risk management.

Similar considerations apply to project risks in the programme team. The main mistake appeared when Nigeria team planned three assemblers for the last assemble activities that supposed to be finished by four assemblers. It was over optimistic that thinking the impact of the risk could be insignificant and taking the risk without proper quantitative analysis. As a consequence, the work was completed 98% at the end of the planned period, making the project team have to allocate minimum three assemblers in the next period, which postpones the project delivery time. The problem could have been improved if the project team had been optimized the process of quantitative analysis and response planning for the project.

Effective programme risk management is such a science that requires time and a concerted effort to perfect. Brown (2007) suggests that analysis of risk should also comprise worst case scenarios that can illustrate what may be the consequence if worst truly happens. Levin (2013) argues risk management is effective when it is proactive. The risk management process should be continuously improved, risk identification need to integrate both internal and external resources to the programme, and constant review and updating of the risk has to be implemented during the programme life cycle. Proper risk management not only reduces the magnitude of the impact of an event but increase the chance for a project to succeed (Kendrick, 2012).

4 Conclusion

            Managing muti-programme is a complex issue to address. Leadership and risk management are regarded as two areas worth learning to improve the performance of programme/ portfolio management. Influence strategies can be important for a successful programme manager to drive the team for programme success. Risk management process can be beneficial for managing diverse risks effectively. With the discussion provided, this report suggests that continuous learning for improvement is the heart of managing muti-programme environment.

5 References

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Brown, J. (2007). The handbook of program management. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Curlee, W. and Gordon, R. (2013). Successful program management. London: CRC Press.

Hogan, R., Curphy, G. and Hogan, J. (1994). What we know about leadership: Effectiveness and personality. American Psychologist, 49(6), pp.493-504.

Kendrick, T. (2012). Results without authority. New York: AMACOM.

Kerzner, H. (2013). Project management. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Levin, G. (2013). Program management. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Lock, D. and Scott, L. (2013). Gower handbook of people in project management. Farnham, Surrey: Gower Publishing.

Morris, P. and Pinto, J. (2007). The Wiley guide to project control. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Morris, P. and Pinto, J. (2007). The Wiley guide to project, program & portfolio management. Hoboken, New Jersey: J. Wiley & Sons.

PMI, (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Project Management Institute.

Rayner, P. and Reiss, G. (2013). Portfolio and programme management demystified. London: Routledge.

Sowden, R. and Office, C. (2011). Managing successful programmes. London: TSO (The Stationery Office).