How do you keep your program deliverables consistent?

When dealing with a diverse portfolio of projects, having clear deliverables and normalizing the performance metrics helps identify the overall impact to an organization as well as where the impacts are. These metrics can be agnostic ones like Cost savings, risk reduction, or compliance.

I believe this is so so important for a project manager and for a successful outcome of a project. Setting realistic and clear deliverables and giving enough time to the team to execute them, is essential for someone who works in project management.

?? Deliverable clarity is a vital aspect of effective program management, in my view. ?? Thorough requirement gathering is key. It must explore the what, how, and why to meet stakeholder needs without ambiguity. ?? Utilize SMART criteria to refine definitions, making them quantifiable and aligned with strategic goals. ?? Consistency hinges on a structured governance framework. Implement stringent change control to prevent scope creep and maintain agreed-upon output quality throughout the program lifecycle.

Keeping program deliverables consistent requires careful planning, communication, and quality control measures. Start by clearly defining deliverables at the outset of the program, outlining specific objectives, timelines, and quality standards. Establish a centralized repository or project management platform to track and document all deliverables, ensuring visibility and accountability across the team. Regularly communicate expectations and updates to stakeholders, soliciting feedback to ensure alignment with their needs and preferences. Implement robust quality assurance processes, including peer reviews, testing, and validation, to maintain consistency and accuracy throughout the program lifecycle.

I've found it helpful to standardize through templates and automation: get your early deliverables into a state you're happy with, then make it as simple as possible for yourself and your team to consistently deliver to the same quality going forward. Where you can't automate deliverable creation, see if there are automated (or failing that, standardized) methods for confirming that deliverables maintain a consistent bar. And as always: don't just assume the quality you like is what your stakeholders want. Solicit and act on feedback as often as is practical for you.

One thing that I've found useful throughout my career is maintaining a library of templates. I've reused my personal collection of templates many times in programs and projects across organizations. My template library enables me to deliver value to my clients' immediately. And I can focus on learning about the client's domain, organization, and its products instead of document formats. Since I specialize in software projects, I have templates with sections for test plans, O&M, and other software-related concerns. I highly recommend adding checklists to your template library. They're great for sanity checks and consistency.

Often standardization becomes very useful in program management. Realising that stakeholders can be diverse and from a wide range of functions, it is important that we communicate in standard industry applicable terms. Benchmarking, competition study etc also become easier.

This is the one thing I've found most helpful. Being transparent and collaborative supports consistency in terms of expectations and highlighting any risks or dependencies to the right stakeholders.

Post delivery follow up closes the loop. Review with the customer. Review with the team that delivered the product. Review with the team that made the initial decisions. Look at the documentation along the way. A great quote I heard once was, “Don’t just do something, stand there!” Be contemplative about assessments. This is your chance to be better. Make good use of that time.

First and foremost, in the new / emerging technologies- Testing and Evaluating and Value Engineering are the essential ingredients to achieve a successful program/s. In my vast experience, we collaborate with various competent vendors / partners, likewise, with our global affiliate/s and to set up a reliable test environment -playpen-. Internally, we collaborate with the Ops - Testing Team to establish Technical Use Case/s along with the parameters of evolving technical standards. Subsequently, we convert these Technical Use Case/s into Business perspectives that will be presented to the Business Group/s; Likewise, Business Group/s to do a deep dive to align with Customer Needs and deliver it in a silver platter as a new revenue stream.