Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or, where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams?

Program management is the art of coordinating several sub-projects to a common objective. Until the parts are assembled into the whole, the parts have no value to the organization.

Agile approaches help manage risk for projects, and we can scale agile approaches to programs.

In this session, we will discuss several options for how to create a program and run it in an agile way. We’ll examine how to report and obtain status, how to create and maintain a coherent architecture, and how to coordinate teams who are focused on their sub-project deliverables to create an overall deliverable for the organization. We’ll examine the issues of how to organize the teams, synchronize iterations, and know when you are ready to release.

Whether you work in an organization that uses agile methods or more traditional approaches, you can learn new ideas about managing programs.