What Is a Program Manager

Inspired by Odd Lot's "What is a CFO?"

I listened to an Odd Lots podcast regarding how the CFO at Moderna allocates capital. At the intro, the CFO, Jamey Mock, described what he viewed as the fundamental roles of a CFO were:

• Controllership - Making sure the books are correct and assets safe.

• Allocating Capital - the point of the podcast. Deciding on where the company invests.

• Support decision making across the company.

• Stakeholder management.

I enjoyed Mr. Mock’s succinct description of his role. It made me wonder if I could do the same for my job. But wait - what is my job? When asked what my title is, I either use Program Manager or Project Engineer. Program Manager has more gravitas - I guess, but I don’t get to use the Engineer in the description, and I very much consider myself an engineer. There are a ton of postings for Program Manager online, but I do not believe there is much consistency on what the role is. There will likely never be consistency, but at least I should be able to describe what I think I do:

• Communicate the status of the program to a larger audience - This is fairly obvious, and least controversial. You have to be able to communicate status, successes and challenges to others in your company, and to customers, clearly.

• Problem solver of last resort - Projects have all kind of random problems that pop up that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s responsibility. Those problems become the program managers to solve.

  Now the big ones

• Make decisions that involve trades between schedule, budget and scope - I wish this wasn’t novel. I believe successful programs need one person who takes responsibility for compromises between schedule, budget and scope. I have seen, and continue to see, programs fail when they try to split the responsibility for the three objectives. They ended up with in fighting and poor decisions, or in decisions that favored one of the three legs of the stool at too steep of a penalty in the one or more of the others.

  Taking responsibility for all three: schedule, budget and scope means that a program manager must be technically competent to trade all three. Not every person who is a program manager is capable of this - it takes hard work. To manage scope is another way of saying, make decisions that require technical acumen. You don’t have to be an expert in every technical field, but you need to have broad technical depth and an ability to learn and go deeper in a specific area when circumstances call for it. You also need to be a good listener. Hopefully, you do have field experts, and you need to get good information from them and ask the right questions.

• Devise and execute the plan - Most would probably say this is a key responsibility and I agree, but it’s not an easy task. As I’ve done this for more years, I’ve come to appreciate the intellectual challenge of managing the plan. Plans require details yet still accommodate uncertainty. Often these two goals are in conflict. A lot could be written on this - indeed I try to cover it in many posts in this blog - but for this post, I’ll just mention two of my favorite thinkers in this area: Nassim Talib and John Boyd.