Tracking a Program

A program has the same key management areas as a project and each one has additional aspects to consider given the larger scope and impact. We’ll touch on each of these key management areas:

• Program planning

• Risk management

• Stakeholder management

Program planning

Regardless of how the program came to be, the key requirements in the planning stage remain the same. The reason that a program exists is to facilitate multiple projects in achieving a common set of goals. The most important step for a program is to define a common set of goals.

If the program is being created from the beginning and no project has started, this is a straightforward task because the requirements as a whole will tell what the end goals will be. Each project would then take a subset of these requirements to form its own goals. In the case of the Mercury program, the requirements stated that the Mercury application needed to be available to $90\%$ of the user base. This became the goal of the program, and the projects took the subset of requirements needed for their given operating system.