Managing Complex Projects and Programs: How to Improve Leadership of Complex Initiatives Using a Third-Generation Approach

Chapter 5Stakeholder Views about the Roles and Responsibilities of Programmaticists

Diversity of Views

In my positions as an executive, an academic, and a consultant, I have now had the privilege of interviewing hundreds of organizational stakeholders about the current roles and responsibilities of their project management professionals, and about how those roles and responsibilities could be more “ideally” defined in the future. Many of these stakeholders have been actively seeking to improve the programmatic systems used by their organizations. They each recognize that their organization’s success is linked to the success of its programs and projects, and they are anxious to identify any means for improving project and program management.

It should be no surprise (given our prior discussions of Exasperados, first- and second-generation programmatic systems, and project management’s potential identity crisis) that the interviews have revealed significant differences in the perspectives of individuals whose organizations were pursuing complex knowledge-based endeavors. Stakeholders often begin their discussions with an acknowledgment that the specific roles and responsibilities of their organizations’ programmaticists may be quite different from the roles and responsibilities of programmaticists in other organizations. They observe that their organizations have, over time, adapted the definitions of a programmaticist’s roles and responsibilities to suit their organization’s ...