Programme management and its information systems requirements

Abstract

By far the greatest amount of project activity takes place not in the form of traditional large projects with dedicated teams of people, but within portfolios, or programmes, of small to medium-sized projects. The traditional project-management systems, developed for the former environment, are built around critical-path networks, to analyse complex sequences of activities, and to schedule those activities within the constraints imposed by the availability of the dedicated resources. In addition to this time scheduler, managers in the latter environment also need systems to assign priorities for resources to the various projects on a day-to-day basis, and to assign tasks from several projects to teams of people, to enable all the chosen projects to make smooth and continuous progress. Hence, the traditional systems must be augmented by a rough-cut capacity planner or master project scheduler and by a people scheduler to meet the needs of programme management. There is also a need for an impact matrix, to analyse the interfaces between projects in a programme. The paper proposes a model of programme management, and this is used to derive the information-system needs of this environment. Examples are given of organizations adapting existing systems to provide the required functionality. It is concluded that there is a need to develop an integrated, modular approach to delivering this functionality. © 1992.