Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve goals and meet success criteria at a specified time. The objective of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client’s objectives. The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals within the given constraints. IT Project Managers specializes in the delivery of technical assets and services that are required to pass through various lifecycle phases such as planning, design, development, testing, and deployment.
A Project Manager is a professional in the field of Project Management. Project Managers are in charge of the people in a project. People are the key to any successful project. Without the correct people in the right place and at the right time a project cannot be successful. Project Managers can have the responsibility of the planning, execution, controlling, and closing of any project. A Project Manager is a person who embraces multiple disciplines, such as leadership, influence, negotiations, politics, change and conflict management. These are all “soft” people skills that enable project leaders to be more effective and achieve optimized, consistent results.
Program Management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization’s performance. The Program Manager has oversight of the purpose and status of the projects in a program and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the program goals are met by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot be achieved at project level. The Program Manager will provide the Project Manager with a program perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have program impacts. The Program Manager may be well placed to provide this insight by actively seeking out such best practice information from the other project managers.
Program management may provide a layer above the management of projects and focuses on selecting the best group of projects, defining them in terms of their objectives and providing an environment where projects can be run successfully. Program managers should not micromanage but should leave project management to the project managers, with the exception that, program management might need to deal with interdependencies, conflicts and resource or knowledge sharing among the projects it manages.
