Introducing the Mercury Program
Explore the fundamentals of program management through the Mercury Program case study. Understand how program goals guide project structures and how to balance scope, risk, and stakeholder needs in developing a peer-to-peer messaging application. Gain practical insights on aligning projects to achieve strategic objectives in technology-driven programs.
We'll cover the following...
As the course progresses, we’ll go deeper into each of the pillars and the traits that define them. Throughout this chapter, we'll use the example of the Mercury application to explore program management. We’ll define the goals of the program along with the projects that comprise it as a good analog to starting a brand-new program and related projects. Going forward in each chapter, we’ll use this program to examine each area or concept, in detail, as it makes sense in the course.
In this chapter, we’ll explore program management through the following topics:
Introducing the Mercury program
Examining the program-project intersection
Exploring management areas
Author’s experience
Back in 2009, in my days as a software developer, I was working at a company that didn’t utilize an internal messaging system. Phones weren’t smart yet, but messaging clients were abundant. However, they all required a central server to be configured in order to manage the messaging network. This wasn’t something that I had access to do, nor was it something the company was willing to supply, so I thought about the idea of a distributed, or peer-to-peer (P2P), messaging system. So, I set out to write one myself, and some of us on the software team used the system for a year or so. It was a fun and distracting side project that we can ...