Spoiler Alert: This article discusses the entire story of Project Hail Mary (1).

“I think you can.”

Spoiler Alert (continued): That’s the story from both the book and the movie. I saw the movie last week – it’s very good – and its plot doesn’t deviate significantly from the book. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll benefit from this article as well.

“My name is Eva Stratt. I’m with the Petrova Taskforce.”

One major challenge for program management professionals (PgMP*) is the time required to gain real-world experience. Because programs are collections of projects that build progressively on the last, it can take years to see a program through its definition to closure phases. Potentially decades to gain multiple experiences through the entire lifecycle. For PgMPs looking to advance their skills more quickly, we need compelling stories that depict programs in great detail. For that purpose, Project Hail Mary and its virtuous antagonist, Eva Stratt, provide a compelling as well as extremely entertaining case study.

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Defining “The Petrova Program”

In my last article, “Finding the Project Management in Project Hail Mary,” we tackled the PROJECT in Project Hail Mary. Detailing how the author, Andy Weir, accurately aligns the fictional spaceship Hail Mary’s mission with the real-life Project Management Institute’s (PMI) definition of a project. We also covered the main characters’, Dr. Ryland Grace and alien/engineer Rocky, strengths in their ad hoc, yet ultimately successful project management approach to their space adventures.

But my biggest revelation when analyzing Project Hail Mary through a pro-port management framework comes in the events that happen back on Earth. Namely, that Eva Stratt is leading a program and is therefore a program management professional.

In the story, Stratt is never designated as a program manager, nor is her work given a program-related title. Specifically, we are introduced to Stratt as the leader of the Petrova Taskforce, “an international body set up to figure out how to deal with the Petrova-line situation” (1, p.45). In this taskforce, Stratt is given unlimited resources and unilateral authority by the United Nations to figure out a solution to the Petrova problem – a.k.a the alien microbes called Astrophage that are sucking up our sunlight and adversely cooling Earth’s climate. Over the years depicted in the story, Stratt develops and directs a series of projects – each building on the information learned from the previous one – to find a way to save humanity. A few of these endeavors include:

• Project ArcLight: The mission to send an unmanned probe to Venus to collect samples from the Petrova line.

• The Guinea-Pig Phase: Grace’s experience as the first scientist to study Astrophage (as well as Stratt testing if he would die from it).

• The analysis of our surrounding solar systems and the discovery of one planet, Tau Ceti, that is near the center of all the infected stars, yet not dimming.

• Project Hail Mary: The one-way mission to Tau Ceti to discover why this star is singularly immune to Astrophage’s effects.

• The bombing of Antarctica to release methane into the atmosphere and slow Earth’s cooling.

Stratt’s work matches PMI’s definition of a program: “A group of related projects and program activities managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually” (2, p. 271). The benefit that Stratt is working towards in this case is saving humanity from extinction.

Given her work is never named, but nearly every other new concept in the story is called the Petrova [“taskforce”, “scope”, “line”, “problem”, etc.], I bet the United Nations would have called this work “The Petrova Program.”

Eva Stratt’s PgMP strengths

One can certainly debate the ethics of Stratt’s actions. For instance, it’s not a great day when one needs to physically force a team member onto a suicide mission, but as a program manager, Stratt’s pretty darn spectacular. Framed through the lens of PMI’s performance domains in “The Standard for Program Management,” I want to highlight three elements in particular.

Strategic Alignment

A PgMP… “identifies program outputs and outcomes to provide benefits aligned with organizational strategy goals and objectives” (3, p.65).

As Stratt proceeds from project to project, she continuously directs people and resources from across the planet to meet the highly ambitious achievements of a) studying the Petrova problem extensively and, based on those findings, b) creating an interstellar spaceship to study the singular solar system that appears unaffected by Astrophage.

While there’s the looming threat that the world will plummet into chaos as resource scarcity begins, Stratt keeps the work singularly focused on taking the next step in the project at hand and never wavers from the program’s larger goal – humanity’s continuation. Even in the face of massive setbacks such as the explosion at Baikonur that kills the original scientific crew, Stratt never falters in identifying that best next step (leaving ethics aside) and maintains the work’s momentum towards the final goal.

Collaboration

A PgMP “creates and maintains synergy across stakeholders, both internal and external, to optimize benefits delivery and realization (3, p. 65).

Certainly, many apocalyptic storylines involve the collaboration of Earth’s entire population to defeat aliens – for example, Independence Day or the newest Fantastic Four movie. But those are presented as a singular battle or quick montage. The story of Project Hail Mary is exceptional in that it depicts the ongoing collaboration of a worldwide endeavor over many years, and then, presumably, decades of continued work to maintain human civilization enough to act on the Hail Mary crew’s findings, if ever received.

Throughout the story, you see Stratt navigate the interesting mix of people as they drop their political boundaries in service of the mission, but don’t entirely set them aside either. For example, in the scene where Grace arrives at the Chinese aircraft carrier (soon to be named Stratt’s Vat) with the subsequent stare down between the U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and the Chinese navy, “My pilot leered through the windows at them and they leered right back” (1, p.100). Stratt largely ignores the outright hostilities and protests, nor is she a warm and fuzzy team leader. What she does do well is identify what is needed and who is best to do the job, bringing the right minds and resources together to achieve a specific goal. Collaboration is built through necessity and purpose, allowing the now-superficial needs and grudges of nation-states to fall away in the wake of her leadership. This collaboration grows only tighter as the program evolves, most wonderfully depicted in the interactions among the multinational spaceship crew and the supporting scientific community.

Life Cycle Management

A PgMP “manages the program life cycle and the phases required to facilitate program definition, delivery, and closure (3, p.65).

In the book, we learn about all three phases of the Petrova Program. Through Grace’s flashbacks, we hear about the initial discovery of the Petrova line and the scientific community’s realization that the Sun is dimming. These problem-identification actions largely encompass the Program Definition stage.

Stratt then enters the storyline, with the Petrova Program well underway, following Project Archlight’s recovery of Astrophage and the need for deeper study of the alien microbes. We ride along through the most exciting parts of the implementation phase as told through Grace’s eyes, including his deeper conversations with Stratt. It’s in these discussions that we learn about her mentality and rationale at different points in the program.

Finally, in the book, we are updated on the program closure phase, when the Eridians measure that Earth’s Sun has returned to full luminance. I appreciated that in the movie, we get a clearer image of “program closure” with a greyer, clearly more haggard Stratt watching Grace and Rocky’s videos as they’ve retrieved the Beetles from a very cold ocean. While Stratt never pulls out her “Program Management Plan” or “Master Schedule,” throughout the story, you get a clear sense of each program phase and that Stratt is mindfully driving the work forward, project by project, towards benefit delivery.

What does this “anti-apocalypse” program have to do with my work?

If you are a program management professional, it’s admittedly hard to draw a direct comparison between the Petrova Program and your own work. Our programs may have bold ambitions (e.g., ending homelessness, curing cancer), but humanity’s salvation doesn’t rest solely on the success of any one program. Furthermore, Stratt frankly avoids many of the elements that makes program management so challenging. She had unlimited resources, autonomous decision-making authority, and 100% compliance with full effort from her hand-picked team. Her program’s ecosystem - though not her circumstances - is downright jealousy-inducing.

So, leaving the problem’s scale and all those “free passes” aside, what the story of the Petrova Program best represents is the methods by which human capacity can be coordinated to achieve ambitious goals in the face of high risks and innumerable unknowns. In the real world, the greatest programs are those with no clear solution, but where finding the answer really does matter. Project Hail Mary helps us imagine what leadership can look like when navigating through such uncertainty. Further, Stratt shows us how we can knit together grand projects to achieve even greater goals. By looking at the Petrova Program, we get to walk through a program from start to finish at a pace much faster than the real world offers and ponder what excellence in our chosen profession can look like. An important exercise to keep repeating in anyone’s career.

“Sign of the Times”

For this article’s song pairing, I’m sharing “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles. In the movie, it’s the song that Eva Stratt sings to her program team during their karaoke party. An excellent performance by the actress Sandra Hüller, whom I appreciated for playing Stratt with such warmth, never letting the character slip into the stereotype of the mean and controlling female leader. Her portrayal of Stratt is a key reason to go see the movie, even if you’ve read the book.

References

1. Weir A. Project Hail Mary. London: Cornerstone Digital; 2021.

2. Project Management Institute. A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide). 8th ed. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute; 2025.

3. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

‌*In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the acronym's use as a credential, where a “PgMP” written after a name indicates successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Spoiler alert: This article discusses the entire story of Project Hail Mary (1).

“Incorrect. What’s two plus two?”

Spoiler alert (continued): The book’s amazing and most fun if you don’t know what’s coming. Wait to read/listen to the book or at least watch the movie before reading this article; it will be worth it.

“Incorrect”

Final Disclosure: In this article, I refer to the book’s plot. The movie comes out in two days. If the screenwriter makes significant changes to the story, please note that the analysis in this article may not line up.

For fans of Project Hail Mary, this interstellar space odyssey tickles the most nerdy parts of our problem-solving brains. And even though I’m far from a scientist, I loved this book: listening to the audiobook twice this past summer, and now I’m on my third round. At a run-time of 16 hours and 10 minutes, that’s a good story.

But while this book is “hard science fiction” at its core, the author, Andy Weir, called it PROJECT Hail Mary. And where there’s a project, there’s project management… or is there?

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Project: The nearly hidden element in this story

Throughout the book, Mr. Weir takes us on deep dives into astrophysics, biology, and engineering - to name a few - but we never hear our narrator, Dr. Ryland Grace (a.k.a, Grace), stop to consider his project schedule or update his risk log. So while project management activities are never directly referenced in the story, if you read closely, you start to see the project, the program, and its underlying components reveal themselves.

To fully unpack this underlying element of the story, I’ll share a quick summary of the plot, then dive into how projects and the program fit into the story, and wrap up with what we can learn from our adventurers, Grace and Rocky, about project management.

Bite-sized recap

Since Project Hail Mary was originally published in 2021, I will postulate that many people read it several years ago. To jog your memories, Grace – both a middle school science teacher and savant scientist – is sent to another solar system, Tau Ceti, to investigate why that star appears unaffected by an alien microbe called Astrophage. This single-celled organism has taken up residency between the Sun and Venus, slowly absorbing the energy of Earth’s primary heat source. The result is a predicted drop in the Earth’s temperature over the upcoming decades, which is expected to annihilate humanity through painful starvation and warfare over diminishing resources.

The book unfolds across two time periods, alternating between Grace’s adventures in space and his memories of Earth as the Petrova problem evolves. The former involves meeting an adventurous alien, nicknamed Rocky, whose species faces the same threat back on his planet, while the latter focuses on hanging out with Eva Stratt, a Dutch powerhouse, as she leads the charge to save humanity.

With that framing in mind, let’s get into how project management fits into this book.

Is Project Hail Mary actually a project?

Project is an admittedly small word to capture an interstellar endeavor sent as the last hope to save humankind. While I can’t speak to why Mr. Weir did not give the book a zestier title – Mission Hail Mary, Endeavor Hail Mary - I do give him credit for using the term “project” correctly.

To review, the Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as:

Project: “A temporary initiative in a unique context undertaken to create value” (2, p.271).

That’s not a lot to go on here, but essentially, you’re looking for something that is a) time-bound and b) has a definitive end product. Grace certainly has a ticking clock on his mission – ultimately set by the amount of food onboard to keep him alive. His work’s value centers on answering the scientific question, “Why is Tau Ceti not dimming?” If he can discover the answer, the value created is – hopefully – the key to fixing the problem back in Earth’s solar system.

As it meets these two core criteria, Project Hail Mary is definitely a project. Similar to Mr. Weir’s diligence and accuracy in applying real scientific concepts to his stories, I’m wicked happy and not surprised that he used the word “Project” accurately in the title of his book.

If it is a project, does it have a program?

Here’s a part that gets interesting in the text. For much of the story set on Earth, Grace is sometimes part of the action and sometimes just our audience surrogate, often observing Eva Stratt as she authoritatively directs the world towards a potential solution. Through Grace, we learn about:

• The discovery of the Petrova line and the Sun’s dimming (a.k.a., the Petrova problem).

• Project ArcLight: The mission to send an unmanned probe to Venus to collect samples from the Petrova line.

• The Guinea-Pig Phase: Grace’s experience as the first scientist to study Astrophage (as well as Stratt testing if he would die from it).

• The study of Astrophage by top scientists worldwide.

• The analysis of our surrounding solar systems and the discovery of one planet, Tau Ceti, that is near the center of all the infected stars, yet not dimming.

• Project Hail Mary: The one-way mission to Tau Ceti to discover why this star is singularly immune to Astrophage’s effects.

• Blackpanel: The paving of the Sahara desert with blackpanels to breed and harvest Astrophaege to fuel the Hail Mary spacecraft.

• The bombing of Antarctica to release methane into the atmosphere and slow Earth’s cooling.

As you can see, there’s a whole suite of initiatives surrounding the Petrova problem, many of which stem from the prior initiative’s findings. Some get formal names, such as “Project ArcLight”; others get playful nicknames, such as “The Guinea-Pig Phase”; and some are only described by their purpose and activities. Throughout, holistic governing bodies are referenced, such as the “Petrova Taskforce,” but the book never gives the entire body of work a formal title unto its own. Altogether, is this actually the “Petrova Program?”

To figure that out, let’s check in with PMI’s definition of a program:

Program: “A group of related projects and program activities managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually” (2, p. 271).

Here, we are looking for a body of work comprising of multiple projects, typically conducted progressively over time. Further - and this is the most important difference between a project and a program - it’s aimed at creating benefits, not deliverables.

In the book, Stratt is setting up most of these individual initiatives, which, whether formally named or not, are projects. Based on each of their deliverables (often new knowledge), Stratt is determining the next aim for human efforts to address the crisis. Finally, and this is non-obvious, the objective of all her work is not the creation of a solution to Astrophage’s dimming properties, such as an astrophage-eating predator. Instead, she is set on saving humanity at any cost - made very clear when she forces Grace onto the Hail Mary. It’s not a stretch to imagine Stratt was also building silos in to the ground to isolate and preserve a small segment of the human population until the surface became habitable again. You can thank Hugh Howey (The Silo Series) and Tim Cain (Fallout) for putting that idea in my head.

And while Stratt’s work comically shines as a masterclass in cold authoritarianism, the actual foundation of her work is program management. She is coordinating a progressive, interconnected series of projects to achieve a benefit - the survival of the human species. Stratt is running the world’s largest program, and she is the ultimate program manager.

So how do they do?

This last part is the most fun. As project and program management professionals in the real world watch our timelines, manage stakeholder relationships, and engage our sponsors, it’s a kick to consider whether the characters placed in these extreme circumstances are demonstrating the best or worst practices of pro-port management*.

Here, I’ll focus solely on Grace and Rocky, because unpacking Eva Stratt as a program manager is worth its own article (hint, hint at what’s coming next for “The Non-Profit Program”).

Grace and Rocky

Of the Hail Mary’s original crew, I presume that the assigned project manager was Commander Yáo Li-Jie, who perished while in comatose during the long journey to Tau Ceti, along with their other crew member, Olesya Ilyukhina. This left the “free-spirited” Grace climbing the walls alone until he is joined by his pentagonally-shaped best-friend-in-the-universe, Rocky.

Here, Rocky replaces Ilyukhina’s role as the ship’s (or now ships’ with the Blip-A) engineer, but interestingly, there’s no surrogate for Yáo’s role on the crew. Whether intentional or not, Mr. Weir directly removed the structured project management approach from the mission. For the plot, this entertainingly frees up the characters, particularly Grace, to take bigger, less well-thought-through swings at the issues at hand. For instance, he shows no hesitation in telling an alien stranger exactly where Earth is in the universe…because humanity’s first interaction with alien life has gone so well!!!

But, I digress, despite the lack of a disciplined project management approach, Grace and Rocky do two things very, very well.

Collaboration

In recent years, PMI has focused significantly more attention on how collaboration adds to projects and programs. For instance, they added “Collaboration” as the sixth performance domain in the newest edition of “The Standard for Program Management” (3, p. 205).

The heart of Hail Mary’s story centers around the relationship between Rocky and Grace. Beyond a clear enjoyment of each other’s company, they work exceptionally well together, and the story provides a wonderful model for how a team can work together through uncertainty. They assign roles based on skill sets, provide care for one another, spend time learning about one another as holistic earthlings/eridians, brainstorm, and let their curiosity guide, but not derail, their work. If you need to think about teaming, this story is time well spent on what creates strong, creative partnerships.

Adaptability

Rocky and Grace’s other talent is how well they navigate through uncertainty and apply an adaptive approach (2, p. 63) to the project, moving efficiently and effectively to the next activity based on the knowledge gained from the last.

Admittedly, early in my career, I was trained to map out entire projects and then – not shocking – got frustrated when nothing came together that way. My training (which was not in Agile project management) never formally focused on how to build out a project in iterations, tying project components together as new information emerged, and using good judgment and solid wisdom to determine next steps.

Project Hail Mary, a story consisting of hundreds of looping “problem-investigation-discovery-decision” vignettes, is an excellent example of an adaptive approach in motion. Referring back to PMI for the formal definition:

Adaptive Approach: “A development approach in which the requirements are subject to a high level of uncertainty and volatility and are likely to change throughout the project” (2, p. 265).

These projects can’t be mapped, only estimated, leaving adaptability as one of your most important roles as a project manager: weaving together the people, knowledge, and tools as the project evolves to get to the final deliverable. Rocky and Grace do this exceptionally well and meet their goal of finding out why Tau Ceti is immune to Astrophage’s effects. Specifically, that Astrophage has a predator, Taumoeba, that keeps the Astrophage population in check, limiting its ability to dim the nearest star.

But…

Grace and Rocky have some limitations, too. Most significantly, once they found this answer, they blew right past the Hail Mary’s defined project deliverable and kept going right into a distinctly new project - the development of the nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba and its delivery to Erid and Earth. Gosh knows, Commander Yáo would have stuffed some of that harvested Taumoeba right into a beetle and sent it on to Earth as soon as they saw it ate Astophaege - particularly with the Hail Mary’s damaged haul. Only then would he have given Grace and Rocky the go-ahead to proceed with further investigation.

This is where the dynamic duo comes up a little lousy-goosey on a structured project approach, which, given that Taumoeba-82 ate their fuel supply…multiple times…was in fact a super high-risk endeavor.

So Rocky and Grace would get marked up as “Needs Improvement” in their performance reviews around risk management and not exceeding their scope of work, but hell, they did save both species. Collaboration and adaptability from these two voyagers ultimately proved the necessary skill set for success at this particular project.

“Champagne Supernova”

If you are a pro-port management professional, I hope you enjoyed this article and getting the chance to geek out over Project Hail Mary. I certainly did.

While project management and its sister disciplines (product, program, and portfolio management) have been structured specializations for decades, as a community, we are still learning about how our work actually happens. This book is one of my top recommendations for anyone seeking inspiration about the structures of our work, collaboration, and navigating through uncertainty.

In the future, I hope Mr. Weir might even consider applying his fabulous writing skills - which make science so entertaining - to the fields of project, product, program, and portfolio management more directly. I’ll even pose the development of a new genre of literature: “Pro-Port Fiction.”

This week’s song pairing is the first song from the new movie’s soundtrack: “Champagne Supernova” by Oasis. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie - and cutie patootie, Ryan Gosling - very soon.

References

1. Weir A. Project Hail Mary. London: Cornerstone Digital; 2021.

2. Project Management Institute. A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide). 8th ed. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute; 2025.

3. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

*Pro-Port Management: the application of knowledge, skills, and principles to manage a project, product, program, or portfolio.

One of my continual hang-ups as a program management professional is the lack of a clear term to describe the greater discipline. That is everything encompassing the management of projects, products, programs, and portfolios.

In other career fields, lawyers have the “law,” doctors have “medicine,” and artists have “art.” A professional who works across projects, products, programs, and portfolios has ________ (play audio to actually hear the crickets chirping).

Organization? Change? Transformations? More projects?

This weakness in our workforce’s vernacular is detrimental. Fundamentally, it limits our ability to communicate concepts that span all disciplines, and, in more subtle ways, it hampers our workforce’s general knowledge of their entire field. In recognition of the need for a word, I’m introducing the term “pro-port management.”

Pro-Port: a compound term that refers to projects, products, programs, and portfolios.

Pro-Port Management: the application of knowledge, skills, and principles to manage a project, product, program, or portfolio.

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I. Current Standards

“But there has to be an umbrella term. Isn’t there?” The existence of an overarching term to describe the entire discipline feels like it should already exist, but I didn’t actually know of one.

To assess current usage for how our broader discipline is referred to, I consulted the resources where I most expected to find a predominant answer: the major professional associations that represent our field and several artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, specifically Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude.

What are professional associations doing?

For this assessment, I focused on two major professional associations: the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the International Project Management Association, specifically IPMA-USA’s website. Both appear to use the terms “project” and “project management” to refer to the parent discipline (projects through portfolios) as well as the specific “project management” sub-discipline.

Common themes across the two organizations are:

• The professional associations have “project management” in their title.

• Mission statements and visions reflect their dedication to the field of project management.

• The offerings (certifications and educational material) extend beyond project management to include the program and portfolio management sub-disciplines.

• Sidenote: Products are mentioned across materials, but product management is not included as a specific sub-discipline in the offerings. More on this later.

My interpretation of this setup - where the mission says “project management,” but the certifications specify the inclusion of program and portfolio management - is that “project management” represents the greater whole.

For a specific text example where the word “project” is explicitly defined to represent all the disciplines, PMI states in the methodology section of their report “Global Project Management Talent Gap” that “Researchers began by identifying 172 job titles related to project professionals (including project, program and portfolio managers, Agile professionals, product managers and product owners)” (1, p.12).

Professional associations are using “project” in a polysemous way. Like many words in our English language (here’s looking at you…orange), one has to interpret via context clues when the content refers to the parent or the child discipline.

What AI has to say about it?

Then I asked three AI platforms (Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude) the following:

“What is the umbrella term for the discipline that includes project, product, program, and portfolio management?”

Here’s a consolidated list of the responses from across the three platforms:

• Organizational Project Management (OPM)

• P3M

• Strategic Execution

• Delivery Management

• Strategic Management

• Enterprise Project Management (EPM)

• Project and Portfolio Management (PPM)

• Organizational Management

• Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

• Governance and Management of Projects

The good news is there are options here. The favorite choice across the platforms appears to be “Organizational Project Management (OPM),” created by PMI and aligned with PMI’s polysmic approach for project management (although I don’t see them use the first word “organizational” very often). The AI platforms also shared a handful of general business terms, such as strategy and organization. Finally, there’s the moderately promising acronym of P3M, the three “Ps” intended to symbolize project, program, and portfolio, and the “M” for management.

II. Defining Requirements for a New Name

Assessing this list of terms…spoiler alert….I concluded that there’s no perfect term commonly used today. All have relatively stark failings as a term to represent our entire discipline of project, product, program, and portfolio management. But the weaknesses of the current terms reveal the requirements criteria for a better one.

Let’s look at the terms in three buckets: a) the dual usage of project, b) generalized business terms, and c) P3M.

“Project Management”

I do not speak for the professional organizations, but I can theorize why they likely use project management as both a parent and child term to describe the disciplines. The word “project management” speaks to the overwhelming majority of their core customers – project managers. At PMI, there are currently 1.66 million (2) certified project management professionals (PMPs) out there compared to an estimated ~6,200 program management professionals (PgMPs) and ~2,000 portfolio management professionals (PfMPs) (3). Focusing the language on the sub-discipline that accounts for 93% of their certificate holders (((PMP + CAPM)/Active Certifications) * 100) makes a lot of sense from a branding and marketing standpoint. I imagine the other professional associations have similar customer splits and subsequent market drivers to highlight project management.

The drawback is that this polysemic usage then runs counter to their own educational standards, which delve into the specific, very real differences between projects, programs, and portfolios. As a learner, it’s confusing. As a potential buyer, it also hides programs and portfolios as part of its offering. When I speak to other professionals in the space, it often comes as a surprise that PMI offers program and portfolio management certifications. While most know the connection between projects and programs, few connect portfolio management as a closely related discipline, either. This leads us to our first requirement.

Requirement #1: We need a term that is unique and has minimal overlap with any currently used terms.

General Business Management Terms

I would argue that more ubiquitous business terms, such as “Strategic Execution” or “Delivery Management,” are also poor fits.

My first issue is that the scope of these terms doesn’t necessarily align with the field of project, product, program, and portfolio management. For example, Strategic Management is a gigantic ballpark that covers how leadership sets and then manages the direction for the entire organization. Yes, project, product, program, and portfolio management are essential parts of that ultimate success, but only part of it.

Requirement #2: We need a term that exactly matches the scope of the four disciplines.

My second issue is auditory. All four of the key terms have that distinct “Pah” sound. “Project”, “Product”, “Program”, and even the black sheep “Portfolio” keeps the “P” pattern. Using terms like “strategy” or “organization” to define the parent discipline for all these “P” words sounds wrong. It's like naming your dogs, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and…Dug. When you violate a pattern, the outlier stands out.

Requirement #3: We need a word that has that distinct “P” sound to match the rest of the disciplines.

“P3M”

Now here we have a potential contender. The final and most promising term is “P3M” with the P3 standing for the three terms “project”, “programme”, and “portfolio”. The “M” stands for management. This term comes from the United Kingdom (hence the change in spelling of programme) in the early 2000s; it is the closest to an all-encompassing umbrella term.

This term is admittedly pretty good in comparison to the options above. The phrase is unique and more closely aligns with the scope of the broader discipline than “project” or the more general business terms. Finally, it includes the letter “P”.

That being said, I’m still left a little wanting on two fronts. The first issue I have with the term “P3M” is that it’s an acronym and one you need to know. You can’t infer what P3M stands for if handed the term in isolation.

Think if you are talking to your grandmother at the next holiday and say, “I’m looking into a career in P3M.” You will have more explaining to do. Also, P3M reminds me of coding languages (python, SQL, Javascript). If I were that nana, I’d think my granddaughter was becoming a software developer.

Requirement #4: We need a word that one can intuit its meaning without direct explanation.

My second issue is that there’s no room for product management inclusion within the discipline. P3M means there are three “P” terms - not four. I personally want to be inclusive of product management.

Admittedly, this is an area where I personally deviate the most from common practice. The professional associations PMI and IPMA certainly mention products in their materials, but do not offer certifications in product management. But in my lived experience, I’ve often managed “products” within my programs, such as a survey that measured the patient experience of integrated care (PICS) at Boston Children’s Hospital or the format of our educational “Salons” at the Boston Chapter of the Alumnae-i Network for Harvard Women (ANHW). I want the door to be open to product management as part of our broader discipline.

Requirement #5: We need a word that allows product management to be included.

To put this all together, by examining major professional associations and using AI platforms, I’ve found numerous terms currently used to describe the parent discipline that encompasses project, product, program, and portfolio management. Yet, in that review, I found many major drawbacks with each term that helped define the requirements criteria for a better word or phrase.

With the stage now set, I’m throwing my hat into the ring to call the parent discipline “Pro-Port Management.”

III. The Case for “Pro-Port Management”

Pro-Port is a combination of the first three letters “pro” found in project, product, and program. Then the first four letters “port” of portfolio. It is said succinctly together, “pro-port.” I include a hyphen to emphasize that the word is a combo of the starting syllables of the core sub-disciplines. I also capitalize both words when used as a title or the start of a sentence, “Pro-Port.”

Now, let’s assess “Pro-Port” against the five defined criteria.

Requirement #1: We need a term that is unique and has minimal overlap with any currently used terms.

Pro-Port appears to have room to enter our language without causing market confusion. Admittedly, the word “proport” is a word in the English language, but it’s a historic, alternative spelling of the infrequently used term “purport.” Purport is not a word I frequently hear in conversation, as supported by findings from Google Ngram Viewer. This is a fascinating tool that graphs word frequencies in digitized texts. Purport comes in at 0.00007% frequency of use against all words written in 2022 and has been declining in usage for much of the past two centuries. For comparison, I mapped our disciplines’ more commonly used terms “project”, “product”, “program”, and “portfolio” as well as the alternative spelling “programme”, which are used far more frequently (0.0009 – 0.009%).

Finally, the historical word “proport” is used at 0.0000002% frequency and “pro-port) at 0.000000005% frequency. Essentially, these words are non-existent in the current texts.

I like pro-port management because it does not overlap with a currently used business term and is not likely to be confused with its closest word twin, “purport.”

Requirement #2: We need a term that matches the scope of the four disciplines.

By making the word the starting syllables of the four sub-disciplines, it inherently has the same scope: projects, products, programs, and portfolios. This structure eliminates any confusion about whether we are incorporating broader business management topics, as suggested by terms such as “organization” or “strategy.”

Requirement #3: We need a word that has that distinct “P” sound to match the rest of the disciplines.

My favorite part about this word “Pro-Port” is in the auditory. Specifically, if you are using this word in conversation or presentation, it matches the sounds and cadence of the other disciplines, yet it is not so close as to be indistinguishable from the others.

For example, try saying the following sentence:

“My university started a project to build a pro-port management program as a product in its educational portfolio.”

As the second halves of the words are “ject”, “duct”, “gram”, and “folio”, using the word “port” in the second half of the term makes it stand out as distinct from the pack. The only verbal hang-up I’ll admit to is that saying “pro-port portfolio” can make you stumble when saying “port” twice, but I think it’s livable.

Requirement #4: We need a word whose meaning one can intuit without direct explanation.

A goal of that similar structure and use of “Pro” and “Port” in the word is to match the existing phrases very closely. By matching those existing words, I hope that a layperson could figure out that you’re talking about the overarching discipline. This is an assumption and will need further testing.

Requirement #5: We need a word that allows product management to be included.

Finally, the opening word “pro,” of course, matches the words project, program, and product without placing a numerical restriction on which terms are indicated. By leaving “pro” to represent all terms, there’s an opportunity for users to include or exclude “product” without creating a logic gap in the language.

“Pocketful of Sunshine”

That’s my case for “pro-port management.” What do you think? Love it? Hate it?

I plan to use “pro-port” in this newsletter and see how it feels. At minimum, it’s a small but helpful tool for my writing. Helping to untangle the distinction between my favorite subject, “program management,” and its parent discipline.

I hope you’ll also find it valuable, particularly towards thinking of our work around project, product, program, and portfolio management as a holistic discipline and a progressive career. Maybe someday it will be easy to say, “I’m a pro-port management professional.”

For this article’s song pairing, I’m choosing “Pocketful of Sunshine” by Natasha Bedingfield. I want to say this choice is about optimism about a brighter future, but honestly, I live in New England, which has been covered with four feet of snow this winter. I actually need a real pocketful of sunshine, as the skies keep dumping sleet every day.

References

1. Up to 30 Million Project Professionals Needed by 2035 [Internet]. Pmi.org. 2023. Available from: https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/global-project-management-talent-gap

2. PMI Community Numbers Q4 2025 [Internet]. ProjectManagement.com. 2026 [cited 2026 Mar 5]. Available from: https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/1064504/pmi-community-numbers-q4-2025

3. McGaughy C. Final PMI Fact File - December 2023 [Internet]. Projectmanagement.com. 2024. Available from: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/76129/final-pmi-fact-file---december-2023

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As a subject, business management is often presented as devoid of human emotion. We schedule, plan, and strategize, but avoid the complexities of the emotions we feel towards the work itself. A tense paradox, given that for many, our work represents a core part of our identity, a place of community, and our greatest intellectual pursuit.

To counter that trend in management literature, I’m bringing Valentine’s Day to “The Non-Profit Program.” But I won’t take total credit. Original props go to the “Planet Money” podcast as my source of inspiration. They put together an awesome Valentine’s Day episode (1), in which the hosts give valentines to their greatest loves this year in economics, including the self-checkout machine at Uniqlo.

Inspired by their fun, I wrote up my nine favorite things about programs.

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Dearest Programs,

In a world of nearly unlimited career options, you are my best match. Yes, you may simply be a human construct of the most common of acts - the combining of many activities into a larger benefit meant to help others.

But regardless, you are great fun and my dearest work partner. Here are the nine ways that I 🩷 programs this Valentine’s Day.

1) Discovery

While the phrase “program management” brings to mind paper pushing, schedulers, and many other boring tasks, that reputation wildly misses the point. You are the place where people become inventors. Building new programs is where we can create, learn, fail, and try again... project over project over project.

2) The Right “Social to Anti-Social” Mix

As someone who loves presenting to a crowd and sitting alone at her desk for hours, programs are the perfect place for ambiverts to be our truest selves. You provide endless opportunities to collaborate with like-minded colleagues as well as reflect on complex problems. I 🩷 programs because you give time for both the introverted and extroverted sides of our human nature.

3) Longevity

You are a commitment. The marathon of work for a transformation agent. But in our sporadic world, I enjoy the time it takes to settle in and figure out how to improve upon a unique problem - either societal or operational. Gaining knowledge that can only be obtained through time and experience. Programs are a place where one can reside for many years and build something grand.

4) Skill Set Overload (but in a good way)

Managing a program turns one into a Swiss Army Knife. An expert in your field 🗸. A data analyst 🗸. A communicator extraordinaire 🗸. A visionary 🗸. A networker 🗸. A problem solver 🗸. A leader 🗸. Almost no stone is left unturned when it comes to the skill sets and knowledge needed to manage a program. Yes, you are demanding, but rarely boring.

5) Launchpad to BIGGER things

For those of us who wish to be great leaders, you are a superb training ground. You provide the smaller space to learn how to lead people, communicate a vision, uphold relationships, pivot plans, corral finances, and put our ethics to the test. To manage a program is to demonstrate one’s capability for greater responsibility, both in output and personal character. I 🩷 programs because they make great leaders.

6) Nesting ground for caregivers

In a world where many of us tango between our jobs and caregiving responsibilities, programs provide a safe haven to build fulfilling careers and still leave work at 5pm for daycare pickup. Your predictability, often with limited work emergencies and same-day turnarounds, gives us the steadiness we need to be available to our loved ones. A facet not true of every job. And when the time is right for more, you give us the work experience and history of success to catapult us into bigger leadership roles (see my favorite thing #5).

7) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Resilience

As AI threatens to upend what feels like everything, those at the Project Management Institute (PMI) predict that the future will need more project professionals*, not less (2). Yes, programs will evolve to need less time on the monotonous tasks that often drag us down (thank you, AI gods, for automating meeting minutes), but – hopefully – AI will open more room for the bright side of work: discovery, innovation, and relationships.

8) Social Good

I 🩷 programs because your end goal is not the deliverable, but the benefits that give us the chance to help our community. Want to help your city fight gender inequality? You can build a program for that…I did. Solve youth homelessness. Cure Cancer. While we may not be able to solve the problem worldwide, almost anyone can make a meaningful dent in the problems they care most about through a program.

9) Programs are for everybody

To that end, the most wonderful part about programs is that anyone can be a program management professional. You don’t need to have gone to school forever or be a savant of world-renowned acclaim. The work of sewing together projects into a larger benefit has been done throughout human history, by many regardless of their education, gender, race, or social status. Even today, many people start pursuing program management careers in mid- to late career and enter through various paths across many industries. Because you are for everyone, you are a perfect Valentine.

Yours Truly,

Casey

With all these warm, fuzzy feelings, this article’s pairing has got to be a love song. With many to choose from, I’m going to select “Higher Love” by Whitney Houston. A simple call for things getting better and better.

References

1. Betty Boop, Excel Olympics, Penny-isms: Our 2026 Valentines : Planet Money [Internet]. NPR. 2026 [cited 2026 Feb 18]. Available from: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/13/nx-s1-5713954/2026-planet-money-valentines-day

2. Up to 30 Million Project Professionals Needed by 2035 [Internet]. Pmi.org. 2023. Available from: https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/global-project-management-talent-gap

*‌PMI’s definition of project professionals in that report includes “project, program and portfolio managers, Agile professionals, product managers and product owners” (2, p. 12).

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez: “I asked two questions to a board of directors or executives, “How often do you launch new initiatives, new projects in your organization?” They say, “Maybe we launch twice per month.”

And they’re very proud because launching projects means that you’re taking risks, you’re innovative. But then I ask, “How often do you finish them or you close them?” And they look to each other, say, “Maybe I think the last time we finished a project was six months ago.”

Mr. Nieto-Rodriguez goes on to explain how this lopsided open-to-close rate quickly becomes a problem and recommends keeping projects short (< 6 months). In that discussion, though, I also heard compelling evidence related to program closure: humans are really bad at ending work.

If businesses struggle to close projects as Mr. Nieto-Rodriguez suggests, how do we ever get the courage to close entire programs, a transformation vehicle that arguably has a much higher bar for achievement (benefits for programs vs. structured deliverables for projects)?

Businesses need underlying systems that encourage program management professionals (PgMPs*) to work towards program closure. For senior leadership, the low-hanging fruit is to train your workforce on program lifecycles and the closure phase, as well as to ensure closure criteria are included in all program charters, plans, schedules, etc.

While all of this is needed, it is insufficient to effectively drive PgMPs to actively pursue closure. As leaders, your top priority for facilitating program closure is to provide PgMPs with the psychological safety to actually aim for it. To do this, you will need to answer these three tough questions.

• What’s my next job?

• What happens to all my hard work?

• Will you judge my work fairly, particularly if the program’s results are bad?

If you back these questions with solid answers, your PgMPs will work hard and raise their hands to openly propose a program’s transition to operations or even cancellation, if warranted. But if you leave these questions open-ended, then PgMPs will only be human. They’ll work within the system they’re given, where keeping their program going is the best way to protect their livelihood, work product/expertise, and career trajectory. I know this because it’s how I was trained as a PgMP in the non-profit workforce.

So how do you build systems that answer those questions for your PgMPs?

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About the “Finding Your Finish Line” series

This past summer, I wrote the “The Great Uncertainty” series, five articles focused on navigating the prospect of program cancellation for PgMPs affected by the federal funding cuts.

This series is meant to explore the other half of that closure coin— why and how do we intentionally manage our programs toward a favorable ending? In studying “The Standard for Program Management” (2) by The Project Management Institute (PMI), I found a significant difference between their guidance on program closure and my field experience, suggesting that “positive program closure” remains somewhat of a mystery for non-profits. This final article, Part 5, is written for executive leaders and portfolio managers to outline the infrastructure needed to support PgMPs in successfully closing programs.

1) What’s my next job?

When you join a consulting company or Project Management Organization (PMO), there’s an inherent expectation that leadership will assign you to new work. Fluidity is built into the model, and the systems are set up to move you between assignments. “What’s my next job?” isn’t too intimidating a question in these environments. But that’s not true everywhere, particularly at large, highly siloed non-profit institutions such as academic medical centers and colleges.

These organizations often follow a traditional model in which a PgMP is hired to manage a specific program within a department dedicated to a specific subject area (i.e., the opposite of a generalized department of project and program managers). For example, I was hired at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) in 2014 to manage the Integrated Care Program, which lived within a larger unit called Network Development and Strategic Partnerships. This model remains common across the non-profit industry. Here are two job descriptions I pulled from LinkedIn yesterday that show a similar setup.

Senior Program Manager, MassHealth Health Equity Program

Program Manager of Workforce Training & Continuing Education Apprenticeships

This traditional hiring model does not naturally encourage job mobility; therefore, the default answer for a PgMP looking to close their program is: “You’re out of a job.” Leadership and human resources are not set up to easily move strong performers between initiatives (particularly if it means transferring departments). For example, at BCH, a change in job required a PgMP to identify, apply for, and be selected for a new position, similar to an external candidate. An onerous, time-intensive process where the responsibility sat almost exclusively with the employee. Further, all that work and interviewing had to be conducted covertly as job seeking - even internally – could equate to dangerous perceptions of disloyalty with your current management. That culture was beginning to change when I left in 2022, but it was nonetheless challenging to seek new opportunities outside one’s station.

To encourage PgMPs to work toward program closure, I’m not recommending that non-profit organizations overhaul their organizational structure or hiring practices. Program-specific hiring offers many benefits: it’s plainly a great way to attract new employees. Rather, an organization needs a strong internal job-transition system in place, where knowledge and accountability are owned not solely by Human Resources (HR), but by the leaders who set the organization-wide strategy.

A stronger system starts with strategic leaders who view the organization’s entire project and program management workforce as a cohesive unit, regardless of departmental boundaries. If you are one of those leaders, have you ever counted all the project and program staff across your organization? Looked at how they progressed up the career ladder? Assessed if they have a common foundation of skill sets? Seen if they are moving between initiatives or staying put?

Leadership also needs to be keenly aware of which initiatives are opening and closing, identifying strong performers, and determining the best staffing for programs and projects as strategic priorities change. The structural setup could take many forms, such as a dedicated PMO/PgMO or leadership tasked with overseeing project and program management staff development. Regardless of how the structure metastasizes, the end goal should be that, if a PgMP shows up at your door and asks, “What’s next?”, you have an answer.

2) What happens to all my hard work?

No one wants to work on an initiative only to see their efforts die on the vine. A PgMP who cares about their work will protect it. If there’s little expectation that anyone else will be responsible for the work, the program will never close.

Based on “The Standard for Program Management” (1), the ideal model is for programs to develop improvements and then handoff those activities to an operational counterpart for ongoing sustainment of the intended benefits. While that’s the ideal, I’m highly suspicious that these transitions happen all that smoothly in any industry. For instance, while studying for the PgMP certification exam, I encountered many practice questions that asked what I would do if my operational counterpart resisted the handoff. My guess is that there’s a practical reason why PMI wants you to be prepared for such challenges.

Based on my experience at non-profits, where the distinction between transformation and operations is often ambiguous, a handoff to operations can be highly fraught. That’s where you come in as a leader. To support program closure, you need to build bridges between your transformational initiatives and operations.

That all starts with developing the organization’s understanding of which work units are transformational vs. operational, and with an expectation that one hands off to the other. I was always thrilled to present to the chief medical officers or administrative directors at BCH on new functionalities that supported care integration. But I knew my words were merely suggestions, not a transfer of responsibility. Furthermore, given an academic medical center’s siloed, broad structure, no single unit ever existed to handoff oversight of these care-delivery improvements. Thus, “The Integrated Care Program” wasn’t going anywhere if we wanted our work to be used.

At your organization, what’s the relationship between transformational initiatives and operational units at your organization? Are there processes and forums in place for clear handoffs between the two? Are your transformation teams empowered to truly give ongoing responsibilities to operations? Most importantly, how are you using your power and influence to foster connections and champion these handoffs?

These cross-organizational relationships are the places where strategic leadership is needed to broker the exchange of responsibilities. If you can build strong bridges for that transfer, your PgMPs can succeed in their program closure process and set themselves up to move on to new, higher-priority initiatives with a clear sense that their past work will be sustained.

3) Will you judge my work fairly, particularly if the program’s results are bad?

Another barrier to program closure is when there’s a gap between leadership expectations and the PgMP’s work product. Two primary ways this crevasse manifests are when leadership evaluates PgMP job performance against the wrong success criteria and when PgMPs fear delivering bad project outcomes, believing they will be conflated with poor performance on their part.

As a leader, you need:

• To judge programs and PgMPs’ job performance based on criteria that are correctly aligned with the stage in the program’s development, and that’s often not “did you successfully implement and generate benefits.”

• To support a culture of openness to receiving bad results, enabling PgMPs to make honest recommendations on whether a program should continue or not.

It’s unclear whether this is common knowledge, but programs are highly risky endeavors – far more than projects that have the advantage of highly specified deliverables (3, p. 41). A program is designed to deliver benefits, and for a novel program, its path to that goal is largely uncharted. For a large part of a program’s lifecycle - particularly one built to actualize a new idea - the PgMP’s role is to learn, analyze, and recommend next actions. With each discovery, they hopefully move closer to identifying the optimal operational model to deliver the desired benefits, but there are no guarantees.

I break this journey down into three distinct phases.

1. Research: The evaluation of whether the core idea can deliver the desired benefits.

2. Development: The creation and testing of a prototype model to deliver the desired change.

3. Implementation: The application of the final, scalable model across the organization and subsequent measurement of benefit delivery.

For the first two phases of a program’s lifespan, success for a program manager is “Did you learn something?” That something could be “It worked!” or “Hard no!”, and both outcomes are technically a success. The business value generated is the knowledge. But there is also tension for leaders when their idea fails to deliver the desired results. The ability to mentally pair that bad news as organizational value and view the PgMP as a strong performer requires a mental deadlift on your part.

Only in the third, implementation phase is a program focused on creating large-scale change across the organization and generating significant benefits (e.g., profits, improved social/health/educational outcomes, etc.). At that point, you can absolutely judge a PgMP's performance by their ability to deliver on the implementation and the value it provides to the organization.

To support a program through these phases to its eventual closure, leadership needs to establish a system for fair performance evaluation. In considering your evaluation methodology, be particularly aware of these two major pitfalls that can cause program derailment:

• Leadership expectations become misaligned with the program phase. Most commonly, leadership expectations jump to implementation and benefit generation before the research and/or development phases are complete.

• The organizational culture only communicates successes. If leadership is not open to hearing that the idea they sponsored is failing or doing so is uncommon, a PgMP will not communicate openly, particularly not about closure.

Both scenarios can cause program management staff to withdraw and become defensive. The program is then vulnerable to spiraling off course, jumping from project to project to chase down the wrong outcomes, and never creating an optimal model for scalable implementation. It’s not solid professional behavior on the PgMPs' part, but if you're asking for something they aren’t capable of delivering yet, or there’s no way to fail without damaging one’s career, your incentiving a program in stasis.

As a leader, you need to signal that you understand programs are risky, that results in the initial phases will focus on knowledge, and that knowledge might contradict your original assumptions. If you build that foundation, PgMPs can be transparent and communicate openly, a necessity for healthy program-building that can progress to scalability, benefit generation, and closure.

Creating safe passage

Remember the last graduation you attended. The pomp and circumstance, nice speeches, that endless list of mostly strangers’ names read until you or the person you care about finally gets to walk across the stage. It may have been thrilling or completely boring, but it did provide value.

Specifically, graduations are a safe and encouraging way to bring a large group together to conclude their participation in one program and move on to the next.

If you are a leader overseeing a portfolio of programs and projects, you are responsible for creating that safe passage for your staff. You don’t need a literal ceremony; instead, create systems that reassuringly provide your PgMPs with a) their next job, b) a place for the program’s work to continue, and c) a fair system for evaluating their program’s output. These are the foundations needed to encourage people to work at their best and towards positive program closure.

“Goodbye, Old Girl”

Thank you for sticking with me through this series on positive program closure. In writing so extensively about this one subject, I found many answers to my questions about this elusive part of the program’s lifecycle. Particularly about understanding that program closure is ideally about a transition, not an ending. Also, there are many significant benefits to developing programs that “keep the end in mind” (4, p. 23).

On that theme of closure and saying goodbye to this series that I’ve been writing since November, this article’s music pairing is the best goodbye song that I know. Another Broadway tune, “Goodbye Old Girl” from Damn Yankees.

It starts quietly enough, but ends with a climactic ballad as the senior Joe transforms into his younger self, closing off his current life for a second shot at becoming a professional baseball player. Here’s Jordan Donica singing that dramatic ending in a recent production at the Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.). Goodbye, old girl.

References

1. The Case For Becoming a Project-Based Org [Internet]. Harvard Business Review. 2026 [cited 2026 Feb 5]. Available from: https://hbr.org/podcast/2026/01/the-case-for-becoming-a-project-based-org

2. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

3. Vijayakumar A. Program Management Professional (PgMP) Handbook 2nd Edition. Notion Press; 2025.

4. Donovan J. Small Town Big Impact. 2023.

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I refer to the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to include anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This Substack is for everyone. This usage differs from the PgMP credential, where “PgMP” after a person’s name denotes successful completion of the Program Management Professional certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

But why?

In reflection, positive program closure is elusive – at least to me – and, based on my professional experience, not commonly incorporated into non-profit programs’ structures. Since non-profit program management is often rooted in professional passion as well as the need to make a living, it makes sense that program management professionals (PgMPs*) wouldn’t naturally aim for closure. On its face, it is extremely threatening to open the door and invite in change… to your team, your subject-matter expertise, and potentially even your job.

Thus, at the start of this series, I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) advice on program lifecycle was correct (2), that all programs should have a closure phase. But looking at the benefits, I am now fairly certain that working towards a program close - one that transitions work to standing operations - is necessary for building both healthy programs and program management careers.

Specifically, it was the support program closure brings to 1) effective decision-making, 2) strategy-implementation alignment, and 3) career management that persuaded me. What do you think?

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About the “Finding Your Finish Line” series

This past summer, I wrote the “The Great Uncertainty” series, five articles focused on navigating the prospect of program cancellation for PgMPs affected by the federal funding cuts.

This series is meant to explore the other half of that closure coin— why and how do we intentionally manage our programs toward a favorable ending? In studying the PMI’s Standard for Program Management (SPM), I found a significant difference between PMI’s guidance on program closure and my field experience, suggesting that “positive program closure” remains somewhat of a mystery for non-profits. This article, Part 4, dives into the benefits of incorporating a program closure into your program’s design.

Benefit 1: Clarity for decision-making

A piece of business advice that I read recently on the value of defining an end comes from Jenn Donovan, author of Small Town, Big Impact. She writes that her “best piece of business advice” is to “start with the end in mind,” sharing a story from her own retail days. After buying a “rundown retail business” with her best friend, they agreed early on that this was not intended to be their forever job and set a goal to sell the business in seven years.

In her own words, “It was the best decision we ever made. Literally for the following seven years, everything we did we did with this in mind – to sell in seven years. Thinking about getting a new product line in? Would it help us sell the business? Ad in the local newspaper - would it help us sell the business? Moving to a different location (which we did twice) – would it help us sell the business?” (3, p.23).

Jenn Donovan sold that business in six and a half years, crediting that early conversation with her partner for their eventual success. In a similar way, defining the end state for a program can bring clarity to the innumerable decisions you’ll need to make along the way. Particularly as non-profit programs often focus on undefeatable social needs (e.g., cure cancer, end homelessness), the program’s mission is a bad goal to make decisions from. It’s too easy to get tangled in all the ways you could address the problem, and even with success, you’ll never actually be done. Setting a realistic end goal for your program gives you a firm framework from which to manage your program, not just ride along with it.

To apply this concept to non-profits, here’s another example. Say you are running a program to fight food insecurity and you develop a program closure goal to establish a community resource that improves residents' access to nutritious food. You may not know what that resource will be yet (food pantry, education, advocacy, etc.), but you know that you’re building towards a single, high-quality resource. The next few years then become about researching and testing different approaches, as well as finding partners in the work. Slowly, the design for your program will form, but every step along the way, you know what you're aiming for.

Now as new opportunities come up, you have that same filter that Jenn Donovan described to help make go/no-go decisions. A partner looking to provide child care services to a similar customer-base reaches out. Does it help craft that food security resource? No, and you pass with confidence. A team member wants to develop a website focused on locations where people can buy locally grown food. Does it align with the development of that resource? Maybe so you run a trial. That willingness to commit to an end vision, even if the tactics are unknown, will eliminate distractions, streamline decision-making, and provide the clarity your team needs to do their most effective work.

Benefit 2: Testing the strategy-implementation gap

Another key benefit of designing a closure phase into your program is to test the waters between your leadership’s strategic vision and your implementation plans.

A top leadership concern is the ability to translate strategy into action, often referred to as the strategy-execution or strategy-implementation gap. That gap can be quite problematic with McKinsey finding in their 2021 Global Survey that about 70% of large-scale transformations fail with poor execution and inability to sustain the effort, cited as leading causes (4). There’s now a sizable amount of business literature dedicated to helping leaders successfully translate strategy into execution (5).

As a PgMP, your program is often the vehicle through which strategy is actualized, and you play an important role in minimizing the strategy-implementation gap. Designing a program close is a great way to move beyond generic leadership conversations and rigorously test whether your plans actually align with their strategic vision.

Going back to our food insecurity example, rather than speaking to the social goal “decreasing food insecurity,” your ability to define the terms under which a program will enter its closure phase will give leadership the material needed to provide constructive feedback. “Yes, we want a resource built out that provides food to those in need,” or… given the reality you now specified, “no, that’s not the right move for our organization at this time.”

Incorporating program closure criteria at the start of a program drives constructive conversations while simultaneously deepening leadership’s accountability for standing behind the program. You’ll find that as a program ages, fairweather leadership can grow fickle, perhaps walking back their initial support for the program when times get tough. Documenting an agreed-upon program close helps ensure that you and your leadership remain on the same page, even as the larger business evolves.

Benefit 3: Positively forcing a career checkpoint

Which brings us to the third and most personal benefit of a program close. While the change that comes along with program closure can be unnerving, it also brings the prospect of new opportunities. Program closure puts needed pressure on both you and your leadership to make important decisions about your career trajectory.

If program closure is not incorporated into your program’s design, you are inherently set up to lead it until either your leadership or you take the initiative to leave – often a situation driven by negative circumstances. There’s no organic checkpoint for you and your leadership to reflect on how the business and your own skill set have evolved, and where you would be most valuable to the organization over time.

If programs have a close (coupled with closure phase activities), it triggers an organic moment for such an evaluation. The benefits to your career include:

• Ideally, with success under your belt, management will shift you to a higher-priority, more visible program with a larger team, budget, and salary.

• The process of conducting a closure can help you relieve the feelings and, perhaps, the social stigma of abandoning your team and leaving work unfinished.

• With the prospect of needing to shift programs on the horizon, you’ll have needed incentives for carving out time for networking and professional development.

• Your leadership will equally have more reason to support requests for conferences and professional development that exceed the demands of your current work.

• If you are well settled into your program and enjoying building your expertise and reputation in a niche area, you’ll have a timeline in place to prepare for taking on the operational role of running the program post-closure and a framework for approaching your leadership about the role change.

It’s often too easy to get comfortable leading a program, settle in, and see where the winds take you. An expected program close creates an environment that fuels professional advancement and adaptability, ensuring you have a healthy career at your organization, and the skills and network at the ready if you do need to change jobs

“We’ll Meet Again”

In approaching this series and my deeper dives into the business management theory behind program management, I honestly questioned the need for program closure. It came up as a pretty radical idea compared to how I was trained in program management earlier in my career. Yet, as I dove deeper into what program closure really means for the work (i.e., a transition, not an end), I found it to be a solid tool for encouraging the healthy and successful development of both programs and program management careers.

If you are interested in continuing to develop your skills around ending work, two business books I highly recommend are:

• The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart: Alongside its exploration of barriers to women's advancement in the workplace, the book delves into techniques for learning to end or transition out of work, useful advice regardless of your gender.

• Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke: A famous poker player, the author has since applied herself to unpacking business management, and in this book, tackles when to stop. It’s filled with guidance on ending work from an economics-informed perspective and contains many great examples of work gone too far, including what seems to be a large number of economists who go on treacherous mountain hikes and blow past their turnaround point, despite knowing far better.

While neither novel is directly about program management, they’ll push you to consider how to close off work effectively. Working on your own skill set in this regard will be helpful to your development as a PgMP, but admittedly, if you're not in an organizational culture that embraces “program closure,” you’ll only get so far. Thus, the next installment of this series will focus on the systems needed to fuel program closure at organizations.

Finally, for this article, my recommended song pairing is an earworm “We’ll Meet Again” by The Fat Rat and Laura Brehm. It’s a great mash-up of violin and techno, with positive lyrics about the continued connection between two people who are now separated. As personal connections are often the hardest to lose when we close down work, this brings a positive spin to considering those changing relationships.

References

1. Melville H. Moby Dick. New York, Ny: Acclaim Books; 1997.

2. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

3. Donovan J. Small Town Big Impact. 2023.

4. McKinsey. Common pitfalls in transformations: A conversation with Jon Garcia | McKinsey [Internet]. www.mckinsey.com. 2022. Available from: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/transformation/our-insights/common-pitfalls-in-transformations-a-conversation-with-jon-garcia

5. Strategy execution [Internet]. Hbr.org. 2025. Available from: https://hbr.org/topic/subject/strategy-execution

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, in which PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

The initial years of the program were admittedly pretty hectic. Her program was hastily launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with little to work from. Through trial and error, her team slowly built an impressive set of offerings, including educational courses, a popular newsletter, and a financial assistance fund. Most of the work now has a regular schedule, and Zosia is assured of ongoing funding for the foreseeable future.

In contrast to those early years, Zosia shows up at work every day knowing, for the most part, what needs to happen. Certainly, with the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), there’s tremendous change afoot in the technologies her program promotes, but the underlying structure was designed to adapt to these shifts. Zosia has finally reached a moment where things feel really good at work.

Then she’s studying “The Standard for Program Management,” by the Project Management Institute (PMI), and reads about the program closure phase (1, p.148). Apparently, programs are supposed to close, and this throws her. She’s worked so hard, and the last thing she can imagine is intentionally shutting down her program or transitioning it to another part of the organization. It wouldn’t make any sense.

This leaves Zosia wondering: does any of PMI’s guidance on this stage of a program’s lifecycle actually apply to her, or is it an area of the manual she should just ignore?

Let me make the case that Zosia should run a “program closure” process, but not to shut her work down. Instead, to fully prepare her program and career for long-term sustainability.

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About the “Finding Your Finish Line” series

This past summer, I wrote the “The Great Uncertainty” series, five articles focused on navigating the prospect of program cancellation for program management professionals (PgMPs) affected by the federal funding cuts.

This series is meant to explore the other half of that closure coin— why and how do we intentionally manage our programs toward a favorable ending? In studying the PMI’s Standard for Program Management (SPM), I found a significant difference between PMI’s guidance on program closure and my field experience, suggesting that “positive program closure” remains somewhat of a mystery for non-profits. This article, Part 3, dives into how the program closure process applies to frontline programs – i.e., programs that are typically not intended to close.

Why do frontline programs not mix well with closure?

In Part 2 of the “Finding your Finish Line” series, we examined the underlying anatomy of a strong program close. Aligned with PMI’s guidance, this is a process in which a program that has worked on an underlying operational improvement (i.e., backline program) transitions its work to operations (HR, IT, etc.) for ongoing management and sustainment.

In these scenarios, the PgMP is formally tasked with completing program closure activities, which I grouped into three major buckets: 1) program activity transition, 2) program infrastructure closeout, and 3) communication, recognition, and reflection.

But what if, like Zosia, you are not running that kind of program? Many non-profit organizations host “programs” that provide goods and services directly to customers and generate their own revenue. I call these “frontline programs,” and they are really not built to end – at least not until the underlying social goal is achieved (cancer cured, digital literacy gap erased, etc.) or they hit an insurmountable roadblock, usually budget cuts. Thus, on the face of it, frontline programs and positive program closure are like oil and water; they don’t mix well.

But I want to recommend that for the keen PgMP running a frontline program, there is a way to apply the underpinnings of positive program closure, and that doing so benefits the success and growth of your program as well as your career.

Recognizing your program’s inflection point

Similar to the way positive program closure for backline programs is a transition to operations, we can think of program closure for frontline programs as the switch in the program’s lifecycle between development and production. Based on my professional experience, this moment admittedly occurs quite gradually and over a long period of time. Consequently, it’s an easy moment to both miss and even confidently judge when it occurs.

Some signals that your program is largely out of the exploratory phase and into routine production are:

• You can write a standard operating procedure (SOP) about how to run most of your program’s products and services.

• You can schedule out the program’s activities well in advance (6 months or more).

• You’ve hosted the event, course, or activity (i.e., the projects) multiple times. The core of the work is starting to repeat.

• If needed, you could hand off the program to a new PgMP and be fairly confident the program wouldn’t lose significant momentum.

This shift occurs through an accumulation of regularity. You are trying new ways to approach your mission, evaluating what works, trying again, and, over time, you start to develop a repeatable, standardized approach. Yes, there will always be work to do, with new demands coming down the pipeline, but the majority of the program’s work is routine. Similar to the example of Zosia’s program above.

It’s at this point that running the three sets of activities in the “program closure” process can be beneficial to long-term success – both for your program and your career.

Applying program closure to your frontline program

As Zosia stands at that inflection point in her program, how would she apply the “program closure” process? All three of the buckets of work described above apply, but they shift their focus slightly.

• “Program Activity Transition” becomes “Program Playbook Creation.”

• “Program Infrastructure Closeout” becomes “Program Role Alignment.”

• “Communication, Recognition, and Reflection” remains unchanged

A. Program Playbook Creation

When a backline program hands off responsibility to operations (i.e., a program activity transition), there’s an inherent push to document and clean up the data to properly train new staff on your work. For Zosia, her program team has organically become “operations” over time, having learned the work along the way. While it’s tempting to let business run as usual, strong program leadership means putting the team through a formal documentation process and creating a “program playbook.”

Further, it’s a time to clean out that digital closet and organize the program’s folder to streamline materials relevant to the program’s current operations, archiving the outdated materials, prototypes, and irrelevant past projects – do not let them stack up. Through this process, Zosia is reducing the risk of relying too heavily on individualized knowledge and creating new efficiencies by clarifying activities and responsibilities.

B. Program Role Alignment

For a backline program, “Program Infrastructure Closeout” is the set of activities needed to disband the program team so that they can be reassigned to the next big operational improvement program. For a frontline program, Zosia’s not looking to redeploy her team, but she should take a moment to consider how the program’s evolution into this production phase intersects with everyone’s career trajectories. As the program’s activities have standardized, the requisite skill sets for the jobs have changed – roles are now less about exploration and more about refined execution and, potentially, the ability to scale operations.

For Zosia, she may have tremendously enjoyed the challenges of figuring out a brand-new program and thrived amongst the uncertainty. The prospect of knowing what she’ll be working on every day and focusing on more routine management tasks may be quite boring to her. A signal that she is better off transitioning the program to a new leader (maybe to a high-performing project manager) and moving on to create the next new program. Or, in contrast, she may be enjoying the outcomes of her hard work and the benefits of having developed a unique expertise in digital literacy. Zosia may be looking forward to exploring how AI will change the landscape of elder care and refining her program to meet these new demands. In this case, staying as the lead of the program makes sense.

There’s no right answer to what’s next for Zosia, but it’s worth contemplating how the phase change of leading a program in development versus production will influence her long-term career.

The same applies to your program team’s career trajectories, and as a PgMP, you play a big role in how that unfolds. If Zosia’s now-standardized program is expected to scale, she’ll likely be able to offer her staff continued professional advancement and new operational challenges. If the plan is to sustain the program at its current level, it’s likely that the staff who thrived in the development phase will be overqualified for the routinized work and also have limited opportunity for promotion. Those conversations are best had sooner rather than later, so Zosia can appropriately set the expectations for her team members and support them if a transition to a new opportunity – hopefully within the same organization – is needed.

C. Communication, Recognition, and Reflection

Finally, there’s a need to recognize the “win” of developing a successful program from scratch. For frontline programs, it’s easy to highlight project wins or note positive key performance indicators (KPIs) in presentations. But since the transition between development and production has no definitive date, you have to name the moment yourself. By hosting a “program closure” process, you can celebrate, reflect, and also communicate your accomplishments to everyone. For Zosia, it gives her an opportunity to present her “program playbook” to her leadership. It prompts a time for a debrief, not at the project level, but at the holistic program level – to uncover lessons learned on an enormous and potentially quite novel amount of work. Finally, it’s a good time for Zosia to update her resume and LinkedIn profile, documenting in as quantitative of terms as possible the outcomes and benefits of her work.

The benefits of the program closure process

Program closure for a frontline program is about intentionally processing your program’s transition from development to production – a time that can easily pass you by if you’re not looking out for it. Key benefits of running the process include:

• Standardizing your program operations to improve efficiencies and ensuring new staff can take over if needed.

• Aligning the reality of your program’s trajectory with the team’s individual career goals.

• Learning from the big picture of building a program and having the right framing to communicate your accomplishments to your community.

Another benefit of recognizing “program closure” in a frontline program’s lifecycle happens far earlier. It gives you definable terms for use during the program’s definition phase: when you’re writing the program’s business case and program management plan. At the start of a novel program, you know the problem you are trying to solve, but likely only have your suspicions on how to fix it. Defining “program closure” as the shift from development to production provides an achievable endpoint for the work (as opposed to “until you solve the social issue completely”), creating more reasonable boundaries for the work and not pigeonholing yourself into a program that will never be complete.

That leads us to the final problem: the words used to define this phase, “program closure,” really aren’t a good fit for frontline programs. Using it in a work setting would reasonably be mistaken as a request to shut down the program. Someday – not today – I’m going to come up with a better term. For now, I’m not willing to deviate from the defined vernacular, but know it’s on my mind.

“Pluribus Theme Song”

I’ll leave you with the simple idea that if program closure is good enough for backline programs, I can’t see why it wouldn’t be a worthwhile set of activities for frontline programs. Doing the deeper work to understand that your program has entered a new phase in its lifecycle can have many benefits, both for the work itself and for the program team’s career management. I do believe we should build “program closure” into the lifecycle for frontline programs, but we also need to tweak the focus of the work and give the phase a new name (let me know if you have any suggestions in the comments section below).

This article’s song pairing is “Pluribus Theme Song” by Dave Porter. I finished the first season of the television show “Pluribus” on Apple TV and have moved on to binge-listening the “Official Podcast.” If you are a details person, the show and podcast are completely fascinating. Regarding this song, we typically only hear the first part during the show’s opener, but try listening to the entire score. The middle of the song sounds like curiosity and uncertainty instrumentalized. Similar to how a program can feel in its early stages of development, where, like the show, you don’t know how it’s going to end. Enjoy.

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, in which PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Before we can understand the benefits of program closure, we need to walk through the inner workings of a strong program close.

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About the “Finding Your Finish Line” series

This past summer, I wrote the “The Great Uncertainty” series, five articles focused on navigating the prospect of program cancellation for program management professionals (PgMPs*) affected by the federal funding cuts.

This series is meant to explore the other half of that closure coin— why and how do we intentionally manage our programs toward a favorable ending? In studying the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Standard for Program Management (SPM), I found a significant difference between PMI’s guidance on program closure and my field experience, suggesting that positive program closure remains somewhat of a mystery for non-profits. This article, Part 2, dives into the activities surrounding a strong program closeout, specifically for backline programs.

Positive vs. negative program closure

Positive program closure happens when you have fulfilled your intended program management plan (i.e., completed all your projects) and started to realize the intended benefits of the work. At this point, the ideal is to “close your program” – which admittedly doesn’t really mean close, more a transfer… a shift… a change, if you were, but not the dreaded end. These are the activities necessary to embed your program’s outputs into everyday operations and ensure the appropriate managing parties (IT, HR, Operations, etc.) are set to keep the work going.

Another rare form of positive program closure happens when the program’s overarching goal is truly met. In this case, a program’s activities are formally retired. Still, at non-profits, where programs typically focus on broad social missions, this type of achievement is difficult to pin down. Still, occasionally we do conquer entire issues. For example, if you were running a smallpox prevention program in 1980 when the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated, you could legitimately hang up your hat with great content. Again, total solutions to social problems are unique circumstances, so while I’ll acknowledge that it can happen, it won’t be the focus of this discussion moving forward.

Conversely, negative program closure is any scenario in which your program completely shuts down its work while the problem you’re trying to solve remains outstanding. For example, all the programs shut down due to budget shortfalls caused by the shifts in federal funding are instances of negative program closures. These scenarios represent someone’s professional heartbreak, often a PgMP. If you need guidance on navigating a negative program closure, please see my series “The Great Uncertainty: Preparing for your Program’s Cancellation.” It covers a broad range of topics from program advocacy through preservation to starting the job search.

The three buckets of program closure activities

So what happens when you have completed your projects and are seeing the aggregate benefits of all the work? Your program enters the next phase in its life cycle, called program closure, which PMI defines as “program activities necessary to retire or transition program benefits to a sustaining organization and formally close the program in a controlled manner” (1 p.233).

Your goal during a positive program closure is not to stop the program’s actual activities, but to officially embed them into daily operations while removing the higher-cost program infrastructure that was needed to support the initial build. These closeout activities can be categorized into three major buckets:

• Program Activity Transition: All services, operations, databases, etc., that you installed at the company must be fully transitioned to another person or group for ongoing management. You’re looking at all the program outputs, such as operations, products, data, performance metrics, and even known risks, to ensure the program’s activities remain online and sustain their intended benefits.

• Program Infrastructure Closeout: Creating change requires intensive labor, dedicated expertise, and often significant time. This lift is why programs as a unit of work exist. But once your work is part of everyone’s standard day, such a dedicated allocation of resources is no longer needed. As part of the closeout process, you need to shut down your program’s infrastructure. This work includes letting your staff move on to their next projects, closing out contracts, and ensuring all payments are made.

• Communication, Recognition, and Reflection: This is the softer side of closure, where you address its emotional and interpersonal aspects. Despite success, closure often means a break in daily professional relationships and the discomforting prospect of change. There’s grief to recognize in that process. You want to close down your program in a way that ensures your community feels supported in their own transitions and acknowledged for a job well done. Along with finding ways to celebrate, it’s also an opportunity for reflection, team downtime to assess what went well and what didn’t, and maybe a presentation to share these lessons learned. Be sure to document these findings for future teams as well. Finally, there’s your own career management to consider. Make sure to cement ties with the people you worked with - update that holiday card list - and document the numerical impact of your work on your resume while the info is fresh. I also highly recommend posting a few times on LinkedIn, which publicly timestamps your work and makes it easier for future employers to verify your past accomplishments.

For all the reasons I noted in the first article in this series, I suspect that for many non-profit PgMPs, the idea of program closure remains strange. These buckets of work hopefully seem logical, but what does positive program closure actually look and feel like? I’ll go back to early in my career, when I participated in a highly structured, very prescriptive program that had a well-defined end embedded right at the start. Reflecting now, it’s quite likely the cleanest program closure I’ll ever attend.

Field Experience: A very structured program’s ending

Over a decade ago, I worked as a consultant at a mid-sized firm, serving at the project management level on a year-long program to help the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic (YVFWC) become Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) certified. YVFWC is a network of community health centers in Washington and Oregon that were working to improve their healthcare services and financial sustainability.

Assuming most readers are not familiar with PCMH, it is a highly structured program of activities and infrastructure upgrades. A governing organization, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), administers the standards and grants accreditation to those who qualify. Gaining PCMH recognition indicates that you are a top-notch healthcare system and can generate higher reimbursement rates from insurance companies (i.e., you get paid more).

I worked as a PCMH coach and helped three YVFWC community health centers in Oregon adopt these standards. Some of this work involved changing operations, such as ensuring each clinic offered office visits outside of the standard 9-5 business hours. Others were cultural, such as teaching aspects of a team-based care model. Some changes were more technical, focused on adopting stricter practices in electronic medical record documentation. While the larger program dictated the methods, I applied them in smaller project chunks across my three clinics; teaching, monitoring, and tracking as we went. Throughout, the work was slowly embedded into the standing operations of each clinic, and after a whole year, we submitted what felt like a mountain of paperwork to NCQA. In 2014, YVFWC received NCQA Level III PCMH recognition.

The projects were completed and benefits delivered; it was time to enter the program closure stage. The PCMH program was formally closed out following the same buckets of activities described above:

• Program Activity Transition: The program had successfully implemented new processes, methods, data analytics, and cultural expectations into the workplace. I didn’t have direct insight into the data analytics support, so I’m unclear on that part of the handoff. My clinic coaching responsibilities officially shifted to the office managers and the medical director for the clinics.

• Program Infrastructure Closeout: I, as a project management level resource, was subsequently released to pursue other client work for the consultancy.

• Communication, Recognition, and Reflection: I vividly remember having many nice goodbyes with the teams at my clinics, who were immensely kind. I also recall the bigger party at the organization’s headquarters, a good buffet, and hearing from YVFWC’s Executive Director, who championed this vision. I can’t recall if the entire program team ever sat down for a lessons-learned debrief. However, the medical director of my three clinics was visiting Boston shortly afterwards, and we co-presented on the clinics’ PCMH experience to my entire consultant company. I was told it was the first time a clinical partner had presented at the company’s headquarters and publicly shared their experiences working with our consultancy. 😊

A nuts-to-bolts PCMH installation is an extensive program with the close built right in. This case shows that a closure is integral to a program’s process and must be done well, particularly to sustain the intended benefits. While I can’t speak directly to YVFWC’s experiences maintaining PCMH in the succeeding years, as of today, YVFWC remains an independent organization (not easy in an era of consolidation), still holds PCMH accreditation, and appears to have significantly expanded its practice network—all good signs of a healthy organization.

“That Christmas Morning Feelin”

PMI does a great job detailing the desired endpoint for programs and the work underlying a successful transition and closeout of program operations. I’ve found it helpful to group these activities into three major buckets and added in a few components of my own - particularly around acknowledgment and communication.

But here’s the catch. This model of program closure is primarily designed for backline programs, where you work to improve the underlying operations of an organization. In such a case, transitioning the ownership of activities and removing yourself from the mix is possible. But what if you are developing a frontline program that directly serves customers and generates self-sustaining revenue? Does anything around this world of “positive program closure” still apply?

More on this line of inquiry in the next article of the “Finding Your Finish Line” series… and then the article on the benefits of positive program closure, I promise!

To not leave you without a song pairing for Christmas, here’s one of my favorite new holiday songs, “That Christmas Morning Feelin’” from the movie “Spirited.” Enjoy and have a wonderful winter break.

P.S. I also learned my lesson on trying to write while celebrating a major holiday. I’ll be on break for Christmas with the next installment of “The Non-Profit Program” coming out on Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.

P.P.S Happy New Year too!

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, in which PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Absolutely not.

In fact, your program is supposed to end. Possible reasons for closure do include failure, budget cuts, and strategic realignment, but your program can also close because you succeeded.

In the non-profit sector, the dreaded program closure is much feared because your job is often directly tied to your program’s existence. To end your program is to justify the loss of your livelihood, professional community, and thought leadership platform. With such significant deterrents in play, program closure isn’t something you’d ever aim for intentionally.

But according to the Project Management Institute (PMI), program closure is a desired and healthy part of a program’s lifecycle(1). Their guidance specifies that PgMPs* should aim for a formal program closure, transitioning program activities to operations for ongoing sustainment and benefit realization.

So, how should we parse these two different versions of a program’s lifecycle?

Subscribe now

About the “Finding Your Finish Line” series

This past summer, I wrote the “The Great Uncertainty” series, five articles focused on navigating the prospect of program cancellation for PgMPs affected by the federal funding cuts.

This series is meant to explore the other half of that closure coin—how do we intentionally manage our programs toward a favorable ending? In studying PMI’s Standard for Program Management (SPM), I found a significant difference between PMI’s guidance on program closure and my field experience, suggesting that positive program closure remains a bit of a mystery for non-profits. This article, Part 1, begins with my assumptions on why non-profits build such long-tenured programs.

PMI’s guidance on program closure

According to the Standard for Program Management (SPM), programs have a lifecycle broadly captured in the 1) Definition, 2) Delivery, and 3) Closure phases. The intention is that every program is built to achieve a set of intended benefits and then transitioned to “Operations” for ongoing sustainment (1, p.13, 140-149).

For example, your company is running “a global IT modernization program” or “multi-phase technology upgrade” (2). As the PgMP, you then work under the assumption that once the new tech is installed, it becomes part of the company’s regular activities, shifting maintenance to the purview of day-to-day management. Admittedly, such programs are framed as short, contained, and well-defined.

The literature offers only a slight nod to program lifecycle ambiguity, noting that some programs can persist for decades before closure (1, p.34, 141). So far, I’ve not found any further specification from PMI on what factors create long-term programs.

Field Experience: Projects end, not programs

As I’ve studied PMI’s approach to program management, that concrete definition of program closure surprised me because it was so antithetical to my professional experience.

In my work, it was always projects that had beginnings, middles, and ends. Goals are achieved, the team raises a glass to success, and then moves on to the next project. Programs were set up to be ongoing, and their termination only meant something bad had happened.

What drives never-ending programs at non-profits?

In considering this conflict between guidance and experience, I can point to three significant factors that support the long-tenured program structure that commonly exists across many non-profits.

1. Non-profit benefits are lifelong ambitions.

Often in non-profits, the intended program benefits are directed toward an almost ethereal goal—solve hunger, stop disease, improve childhood literacy, prevent suicide, etc. These goals are what make programs an ideal vehicle for non-profits in the first place. Programs are focused on delivering benefits. These goals are the benefits.

These big goals also result in the program’s continuous nature. I don’t imagine we’ll cure all forms of breast cancer in my lifetime. Therefore, if you run a program advocating for the cure to breast cancer, you’ll always be onward and upward to the next project in your work. That cycle has no purposeful reason to end because while you’re making headway on the problem, it still persists.

2. Many non-profit programs are frontline, self-sustaining vehicles.

After reading PMI’s literature, I conclude that the guidance is intended for programs designed to improve an organization’s underlying operations. I call these “Backline Programs.” Examples include installing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, building a new mass transit system, etc (2). These are the programs that have a clear end with transition to a team for ongoing operations (until the next improvement program comes around).

At non-profits, a program intended to reduce childhood drownings will focus on providing swim lessons to kids. That’s a service people are willing to pay for, which generates revenue to fund more swim lessons for the next batch of kiddos. I call these “Frontline Programs.” They are programs (and publicly named as such — see the YMCA’s Sports and Swim Programming) that also merge with operations. With ongoing revenue and a continuous customer base, these programs have no reason to close.

3. Non-profits lack job fluidity, discouraging PgMPs from program transition.

When I worked at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), I was hired as “Program Manager of Integrated Care.” In a world where I achieved the program’s goals and closed the program, continuing at the institution would have required finding, interviewing, and acquiring a completely new job. In gathering information on the career progressions of mid- to upper-level administrative management at BCH, I discovered that transitioning departments was extremely challenging and atypical. The most common career track among leaders was a direct climb through promotions within one’s department, with little change in job focus. The organizational culture was not set up to encourage PgMPs to aim for program closure in their work.

This setup is certainly not the case for all non-profits, and job fluidity—the ability to change roles—likely looks quite different across start-ups, smaller non-profits, and other industries compared to the natural rigidity of an academic medical center. Still, as non-profits tend to be academically inclined and encourage long tenures, I believe a common theme for PgMPs is that current career tracks foster deep expertise development, which creates an intense fear of losing the platform (i.e., program) where such expertise is applied.

“Closing Time”

The problem with non-profits’ tendency to build “never-ending” programs is that eventually they do end, and that downfall can be heartbreaking. Your organization’s priorities will change, recessions will come for your budget, or unforeseen emergencies will unravel the world overnight. If we design our programs around continuous work toward a nearly unachievable goal, the end of our work will inherently be a bad one…abrupt and adjacent to job loss. Minus retiring and handing the reins to a worthy successor, this setup leaves us vulnerable to only sad endings.

Conversely, as PgMPs, we may only be able to achieve our best work nestled in the safety of a long tenure. In an article titled “Non-Profit Power: 5 Years In”, I reflect on my fifth anniversary with ANHW Boston and wrote, “Over five years, you deepen your expertise and build your relationships to an intense level. Certainly one where you can deliver exceptional work, perhaps even become capable of achieving benefits that no other person on the planet can replicate.”

Non-profit PgMPs admittedly find themselves in a bind. I can make a reasonable case for supporting either program closure or program continuation as the better path. There’s clearly no single correct answer to any particular program’s ideal lifespan.

But one advancement that the non-profit industry should consider is how to incorporate program closure more positively into its program infrastructure. Setting firmer, achievable program goals and encouraging PgMPs to run new programs can provide tremendous benefits to the industry and a healthier work environment for all. We can’t get there overnight and certainly without changing the system around PgMP careers.

I’ll dive deeper into the benefits of program closure and what PgMPs need to thrive around program closure in my upcoming articles. Look for the next installation of “Finding Your Finish Line” on Wednesday, December 10th.

This week’s song pairing is a personal favorite: “Closing Time” by Semisonic. Listening to those lyrics, you’ll hear no judgment that closing is a bad thing. The bar’s done its job and helped people meet, mingle, maybe fall in love… or at least lust. Closing is simply the resolution of the evening as it progresses towards morning. Perhaps it should be the same with programs?

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

2. PMtraining [Internet]. Pmtraining.com. 2025 [cited 2025 Nov 12]. Available from: https://www.pmtraining.com/pgmp/practice-exams

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, in which PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Correction (12/6/25): The publication date for the next article was updated from November 26th to December 10th. Thanksgiving🦃got in the way of my publication schedule. Gobble, gobble.

As a program management professional (PgMP*), you are in the best position from which to identify and foster effective collaborations, leveraging your birds-eye view and deep expertise of the program. It is also the core place in your work from which to add outsized value, supporting the case for your career’s elevation.

But only if you find the right collaborations.

Let’s dive in…

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*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, in which PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

I. Understanding collaboration

Early in my career, I was a consultant at a midsize firm, and one of my clients had quite the memorable poster hanging in the conference room. It was a gorgeous photo of the Great Wall of China with the phrase “Teamwork: Many Hands, Many Minds, One Goal” underneath.

It struck me then, as it does now, of the irony in this poster. The Great Wall of China was built with forced labor. Along with 300,000 soldiers, the Qin Emperor conscripted nearly 500,000 people to build his original wall, which was completed in 211 B.C.E. (1). Along with criminals, civilians were also conscripted, where “many of these workers were forcibly dragged from their homes” (1). Tens of thousands are believed to have perished at the wall, with their bodies then used as building material. Early human history is not pretty.

While the Great Wall is nonetheless a monument to human ingenuity and a simply gorgeous creation, treating it as an exemplar of teamwork that we should aspire to is a mistake. The best of teamwork obviously can’t consist of people working under duress and risking their lives. Yet, fifteen years after I spotted this poster in that conference room, it is still for sale on office supply websites.

This is all to say that sometimes in business, we need to think more deeply about what teamwork and its sister term “collaboration” actually mean.

What is “collaboration” to program management?

Collaboration, taken from Oxford Languages (i.e., Google search), is defined as “the action of working with someone to produce or create something.” For anyone in the pro-port management universe (projects, programs, products, and portfolios), this term is essentially synonymous with our daily work. We are constantly working with people, trying to move forward on the next steps.

Collaboration beyond this daily grind for PgMPs is about finding points in the work where people and groups with different skills, knowledge, and resources can work together to achieve a far greater outcome. Through the accumulation of these achievements built on collaboration, the quality and/or quantity of your program’s benefits (i.e. how you help people) can dramatically expand.

For PgMPs newly elevated from project management, a significant shift is the increased complexity and scale of collaboration. Along with fostering a collaborative environment among your program and its related project teams, you are also keeping your head up, seeking productive partnerships with stakeholders, both internal and external to your organization. As a PgMP, you’re casting a much wider net, looking for teams, departments, or other organizations with a similar goal, but different resources.

Collaboration as a synergistic effect

While collaboration is a soft skill that can be easily discounted, it is especially important for PgMPs because it is the area where your labor can work while you sleep.

Truth be told, much of program management work is steady and incremental. If you were to start giving imaginary points to your contributions like you’re a wizardry student at Hogwarts,

· You created a program charter (10 points)

· You updated your stakeholder log (2 points)

· You identified an external risk in the resurrection of “he-who-must-not-to-be-named” (60 points… you won the House Cup!)

You monitor, log, and manage at a steady clip. For the most part, your work has a one-to-one relationship with the pacing of your program’s progress. If you let off the gas, your program will falter. If you push too hard, you lose staff to burnout.

But across the work, collaboration presents you with a golden opportunity. You are the one in every room; working, hearing, and learning from every stakeholder. From this viewpoint, you will see collaborations where others can’t. While the effort to foster a new partnership does take effort on your part, if that collaboration creates something that your program couldn’t otherwise do independently, you’ll achieve a synergistic effect with an indeterminate range (like a “Chamber of Secrets level” 200 points)!

But what does this really look like in the field? Here are two stories from my professional experiences running programs.

II. Field Experiences: Program Collaboration

Boston Children’s Hospital

At Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), I ran the Integrated Care Program, which aimed to improve the coordination of care across a patient’s providers to achieve better health outcomes. The program team was always small (at our largest, five staffers) and a true bottom-up program, the expansion of an “idea” with absolutely no organizational mandate. While it was cool to be a startup within an academic medical center, it also meant clinic teams didn’t have to work with us.

If we had stayed to ourselves, crunching data and developing tools, we might have had some good ideas, but the program would have quickly flamed out. Our absolute greatest strength was collaboration—the ability to foster meaningful partnerships with clinical teams across the hospital and with local referring provider partners. At the height of our work in 2019, we were conducting projects with the Departments of Neurology, Gastroenterology, Genetics, and Urology, as well as with the top referring partners in the state. Further, the Chiefs and Medical Directors at these departments regularly spoke on our behalf at executive leadership meetings, adding tremendous credibility to our cause.

Through these alliances, we gained a toehold across a sizable portion of the hospital’s operations from which to work on our tools, measures, and processes for improving care integration. We may have been a small group, but our collaborations amplified our presence well beyond anything I could have achieved with 3x the project staff.

Alumnae-i Network for Harvard Women

Now, as the President of the Boston Chapter of the Alumnae-i Network for Harvard Women (ANHW), I regularly utilize the skills I learned at BCH to advance our mission: supporting women’s leadership and equity. With a volunteer steering committee, our most limited resource is time. After trialing a mentorship program ourselves, we learned how impractical it would be to run one for our group. We pivoted and joined forces with the New Girls Network (NGN), part of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts. NGN runs a robust mentorship program for early-career women in the Boston area, with dedicated staff and the resources to support high-quality logistics.

We brought to the table mentor/mentee recruitment capabilities as well as the development of a professional educational workshop on women’s leadership. Through this collaboration, we are achieving a core goal for both our groups: supporting women’s mentorship at a scale we could not achieve on our own. For NGN, they have ANHW Boston’s enthusiastic support, a professional partner, and, where helpful, an ability to point to a Harvard-affiliated organization as an ally (I’ll throw absolutely no shade on sharing prestige branding). While still in our first year, we are seeing the benefits of women supporting women in their careers. It’s not a golden ticket to achieving gender equity across the region, but it’s undoubtedly one of those impactful ingredients.

“Ripple”

I hope these examples from my professional career bring to life how positive collaborations can dramatically advance your program’s goals and benefit your community. These were not service or contract agreements, but true collaborations built on mutual objectives and, honestly, friendship. Particularly in resource-strained non-profit organizations, these types of partnerships are the lifeblood of non-profit programs. But that is to say that not all collaborations run smoothly.

I’d be remiss not to mention that the more people you add, the more complexity you introduce, and the greater the risk you take in realizing your program’s outcomes. Further, additional stakeholders add more direct work to your plate, from simply adding to your communications plan to the larger work of maintaining alignment over time on strategic goals.

Collaboration is not an area to swing the door open and always say “yes.” Forming partnerships needs to come from an introspective space, knowing that both your goals and, frankly, your work styles are strongly aligned. From there, collaborations need to be fostered and maintained through positive relationship management. For a good resource on the factors that best support collaboration, look to The Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Standard for Program Management (SPM) (2). In the most recent edition, PMI brings “Collaboration” into the spotlight as its own performance domain (i.e., big category in a PgMP’s workload) and gives solid advice on factors that impact collaboration’s success, such as engagement, alignment, transparency, etc.

Finally, for PgMPs building a case for your promotion or raise, make sure to point to your contributions to identifying, building, and maintaining collaborations. They are the value you bring that resonates much past your day-to-day deliverables. Collaborations are your RIPPLES!

On that word, I’ll share this article’s song pairing. Yes, it’s really not Christmastime, and I wish I had a Halloween song for you, but what came to the surface for this article was “Ripple” from the movie Spirited. Sung by Will Ferrell and the movie’s ensemble, it’s an incredibly accurate descriptor of how one change can multiply to a greater common good.

P.S. I have a second - very different - song pairing for this article because Da-Da-Dum Dadada-Dum Da-Da-Da-Dum Dadada-Dum. Ice Ice Baby, alright, stop, COLLABORATE, and listen.” This silly, silly song has that nice juicy business term, Collaborate, right at the start. Caveat that as a teacher of program management, I have to encourage everyone to listen before they collaborate and certainly don’t STOP first. The 90s were weird.

References

1. Building the Great Wall of China | Research Starters | EBSCO Research [Internet]. EBSCO. 2022. Available from: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/building-great-wall-china

2. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

• A knowledgeable sounding board to talk through your program’s challenges.

• An expert in program management to guide you on everything needed to build a fantastic program.

• A backup who shares and bears some of the mental workload of tracking progress.

• A resource that knows how to set up a snappy decision tree that gets your program moving and helps you work more effectively with leadership.

• An advocate who can provide backup when bad news needs to be communicated and difficult decisions need to be made.

This best friend can be a “Program Management Office” (PgMO): a program management expert(s) who is there to support you.

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Where are all these PgMOs?

But alas, this resource is far from ordinary. In the non-profit industry, while Project Management Offices (PMOs) are common, I’ve never observed the existence of a dedicated PgMO, much less one that functions in the way specified by the Project Management Institute (PMI) – more on this unique take later.

Based on my experience working in Boston (United States), I assume that PgMOs are rarely used in the non-profit industry. However, in researching PgMOs, I’ve found their worth deserves stronger consideration.

Particularly as non-profits work to untangle society’s most intractable problems, we need to improve our ability to run effective programs. That lift cannot be borne by program management professionals (PgMPs*) alone in their silos across the workforce. A PgMO can provide a centralized touchpoint and necessary guidance to help PgMPs master their complex discipline, ensuring that tough programs ultimately succeed in realizing their benefits.

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, where PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional certification offered through the Project Management Institute (PMI).

PgMO structure

In formulation, a PgMO (1, p. 26-27, 122) can have many different setups and sizes broken down across two categories:

• Enterprise-wide PgMO: These PgMOs are large, centralized management structures. In this setup, the enterprise-wide PgMO assumes responsibility for enhancing the maturity of program management across the organization. They set the standards for program management and assign officers to individual programs as guides and supports. These organizations also provide training to the broader program management workforce (or aspiring employees, such as project managers and coordinators). While PgMOs can stand as an independent office, you may have a PgMO under the umbrella of a broader project management organization (PMO) or portfolio management organization (PfMO).

• Program-specific PgMO: This is a PgMO created for an individual program, in which case this PgMO becomes an internal part of the program’s infrastructure. In most circumstances, a program-specific PgMO would consist of one person or, potentially, a small group of highly experienced and expert program management professionals. They serve the same function as a PgMO officer being assigned to a program by an enterprise-wide PgMO. But unlike an enterprise-wide PgMO, this PgMO setup has no organization-wide responsibilities. They exist only to ensure that a high-quality program management methodology is implemented within that target program.

Regardless of the setup, the essential part is that when organizations engage in a PgMO, there’s a person with experience and expertise charged with ensuring that a high-quality program management methodology is used to create a successful program.

Key functions

A PgMO has two key functions according to the Standard for Program Management (1, p. 26).

• Governance: The PgMO establishes the governance structure for a program, essentially setting up the leadership structure and the protocol for making decisions. The hope is that the PgMO is introducing a governance structure commonly used across the organization and then helps the program sponsor and/or program manager (if assigned yet) adapt that plan to the program’s specific circumstances. In this way, a PgMO gets a program through its first highly technical, detailed step.

• Methodology: As the program proceeds, the PgMO serves as a teacher, coach, and monitor to the program manager, ensuring that core practices of program management are implemented. Given the sheer number of plans, logs, and registers to maintain as recommended by the PMI (stakeholder registry, benefits management plan, risk register, change log, and the list goes on), it’s only human to let these items slip if no one else is reading them. The PgMO provides an accountability partner to keep up with the essential, but non-urgent work. Furthermore, everyone needs feedback. It’s not necessarily an appropriate use of a program’s sponsors’ or steering committee members’ time to conduct a detailed review of every program document. A PgMO can be that essential reviewer, freeing up the program leadership’s time for higher-value activities.

Throughout the program’s lifecycle, an essential component is that the assigned PgMO officer and the program manager establish a strong, trusting relationship. Those ingredients will trickle down to the project staff, allowing an entire program team to navigate the most formidable challenges in a program’s evolution: an inevitability for a long-running program tackling a complex societal problem.

PgMO’s quirky authority

A fun fact about a program-specific PgMO or PgMO officer assigned to a program is that their authority is not top-down. As an “Office”, one may intuit that the PgMO has direct jurisdiction over the program manager, but that is not the case. According to the PMI, the PgMO sits below the program manager and above the project managers in a program’s hierarchy. This genuinely surprised me and took a minute to understand.

The placement truly speaks to the PgMO’s unique role as a coach, mentor, and reviewer in the implementation of a program. Furthermore, it reinforces the program manager’s authority over their own program, with the PgMO holding no formal decision-making power over the program’s trajectory. That’s ultimately between the program manager and their steering committee.

Field experience: “Growing up” without a PgMO

With the rules of the road laid out for what a PgMO is about, I’ve admittedly never worked for an organization that maintained a dedicated PgMO nor supported the functions of one within a broader PMO or PfMO umbrella. I learned how to manage programs through lived experience, but in twenty-twenty hindsight, I see plenty of ways a PgMO would have helped my work and my career thrive.

My experiences with PMOs and learning program management

As a consultant at a mid-sized firm early in my career, a project management office (PMO) was established in my last year with the company. Unfortunately, its benefits did not reach me before I left the organization. I then arrived at Boston Children’s Hospital to run the Integrated Care Program. I was happily included in their PMO’s regular reporting meetings and provided training in Six Sigma methodology. It was incredibly helpful in enhancing my project management skills during those initial years. Still, the material never directly addressed the complex task of integrating projects over a long period of time to achieve a broader benefit (i.e., program management). After I had worked through what the PMO offered in project management training, my relationship with the PMO ultimately trailed off as they had no direct responsibilities to my program.

In my experience, the discipline of program management was learned through field experience. I observed and supported senior staff. Along the way, I picked up their methodologies and techniques for managing stakeholders and mitigating risk (even if we didn’t use that terminology). No one was certified in program management, nor did they view the work necessarily as a dedicated discipline in which to seek out advanced skills and techniques.

My informal PgMO was the program sponsor who was highly involved in the daily operations of the program, had the time to train me, but was also limited as a practitioner based on lived experience, not learned methodology. There were gaps that neither he nor I knew. Now, in retrospect, I can see where our program failed to evolve to changing market dynamics or successfully track well-defined program benefits. Aspects that ultimately capped the Integrated Care Program’s potential.

I’m confident that a formal PgMO would have been a boon in my career and helped my program reach greater heights. In supporting the evolution of the non-profit industry’s program management workforce, this is a feature of the sector that I hope to change.

A call for PgMOs

In educating myself on PgMOs, my key takeaways are that PgMOs acknowledge the complexity of program management as a job and that the absence of PgMOs at non-profits may reflect an underestimation of the training and education required to run successful programs.

For organizations seeking better results from their programs, look beyond trainings (although education is always a boon) and consider establishing a PgMO to support your program management workforce.

For program management professionals running complex programs, please know that going it alone may be typical, but it should not be the standard. Even if you don’t have access to a formal PgMO, look for ways that your leadership, team members, and even online professional forums, such as those hosted by PMI, can fill the role. Consider asking an adept project manager to review your risk registry for feedback. Set up with a trusted mentor or steering committee member to be a sounding board for program-related challenges. Post questions to PMI’s online forums to check your assumptions on methodology. Based on the literature, the bar for support should be far higher than the currently available. While the industry catches up, be proactive in securing these resources for yourself. Recognize that a coach, mentor, and reviewer are essential, not just nice to have, for running successful programs.

“For Good”

This week’s song pairing is “For Good” from the musical “Wicked”. Yes, I’m excited about the upcoming release of the new film in November! It is a perfect song for conveying the value of a strong partnership — one that requires both friendship and differing perspectives. Here is the original Broadway cast’s version with Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel. I’ll be sure to return and post the movie’s version when it is released.

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

2. Vijayakumar A. Program Management Professional (PgMP) Handbook 2nd Edition. Notion Press; 2025.

   ‌

To my benefit, my back does feel better. Larger muscles have emerged, however slowly, and while I’m not pain-free, my spine no longer feels like a twig about to snap. My gym mates are wonderful as well. We chatter happily about inane topics and cheer each other on while doing dumbbell push presses and farmer carries. I also know deep inside my body is preparing to carry me through a longer, fuller life. Healing, camaraderie, and long-term wellness: the benefits of exercise are vast.

But what have I actually “produced” with all this exercise? Arguably not much.

I’ve run miles yet journeyed nowhere. I’ve lifted weights, yet created no new instrument or product. While our ancestors labored to put food on the table, I spin on a stationary bike to burn off that once-coveted energy.

My experience exercising broadcasts that difference between an output and a benefit. Each time I go to exercise (i.e., a project), I put a lot of energy and focus into physical labor that doesn’t necessarily produce much (a bit more muscle, but mostly just a sweaty, stinky person). However, when all my exercising is combined (i.e., the program), the benefits are enormous, as I become a healthier, happier person, more capable of tackling other challenges in my life.

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What are “Benefits” in program management?

I hope this example of extremely low output yielding significant benefits illustrates the distinction between the two concepts of output and benefits. As a program management professional (PgMP), understanding these differences is fundamental to navigating between projects and programs. Specifically:

• Projects are about outputs or deliverables. You run a project to create something new, such as a product, service, or piece of knowledge. But unlike my exercise, projects hopefully produce a large number of highly valuable outputs.

• Programs are about tying those outputs together into bigger, compounded benefits. In my personal case, I am a healthier person, which consequently makes me more productive in other aspects of my life. It also statistically reduces my lifetime healthcare costs, which is beneficial for society as a whole. For a non-profit program, benefits are about a) making a personal impact that improves an individual’s life and b) curbing an underlying problem at the population level to improve society at large.

Example: Breaktime

To illustrate benefits at a non-profit program, I will put a spotlight on an organization called “Breaktime,” a non-profit based in Boston that works to solve young adult homelessness. For transparency, I have no affiliation or relationship with this organization; I chose it as an example because of its excellent website, which clearly communicates Breaktime’s purpose and its program. Specifically:

Goal: “Breaking the cycle of young adult homelessness.”

Projects: They have a program model where youth facing housing insecurity go through phases called “Launchpad,” “Liftoff,” and “Stable Orbit”. Each phase (i.e., project) is an incremental progression of job and life skills training, combined with work experience and wrap-around services (e.g., healthcare). The progression of these projects forms the program.

Outputs: At each phase, a vulnerable youth gains more sophisticated job skills, builds their finances, establishes a work history, and finds a stable living situation - to name a few.

Benefits: The program provides individuals with the tools and resources necessary to lead stable, prosperous lives independently and avoid homelessness over the long haul. Societally, we all benefit from a reduction in young adult homelessness, and the city grows stronger.

Breaktime uses projects that create outputs that accumulate into larger benefits, one that impacts specific people and society as a whole. It’s impressive and an exemplar for how non-profits utilize project and program management to meet their missions.

How do PgMPs manage benefits?

As a program management professional, we are the people who bring this formula to life. One of our key responsibilities is to manage benefits, and it’s challenging work.

In the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Standard for Program Management, benefits management is recognized as the second of the six performance domains (1 p.80-96). PMI helpfully breaks down the work into approachable activities. In short summation:

1. Benefit Identification: The creation of a list or “Benefits Register” of all the intended benefits expected by the program. You often compile the ideas from across your stakeholders to verbalize the benefits.

2. Benefits Analysis and Planning: The establishment of the rules of the road for how you will monitor the creation of benefits. This phase involves determining how to measure the benefits and their expected delivery timeline. All this information is then compiled into a “Benefits Management Plan.”

3. Benefits Delivery: Utilizing your “Benefits Management Plan”, you track the delivery of the intended benefits and, of course, adjust as your program evolves with new knowledge, setbacks, and influences. The hope is that your identified benefits should change very little over time, but the means and potentially the timeline in which they arrive shift as the program evolves. You’re on point for understanding, synthesizing, and communicating those fluctuations.

4. Benefits Transition: As your program reaches a hopefully successful conclusion, it’s ready to be integrated into operations or established as a standing service (i.e., frontline program*). You are then identifying all the activities and discussions needed to ensure a seamless transition of the program and it’s corresponding benefits to the new owner.

5. Benefits Sustainment: Before officially closing out the program, you create a “Benefits Sustainment Plan” with the necessary information to ensure the new owners can maintain and successfully track the realization of benefits going forward.

*PMI focuses programs on work that is done internally at an organization, such as improving underlying operations. The end goal of these programs is to be integrated into standing operations eventually. At non-profits, I’ve observed that many revenue-generating services (i.e. operations) are often defined as programs. For example, the aquatics program at the YMCA. I like to cover both these backline and frontline programs, as they require similar activities from the overseeing program management professional.

The key challenge of managing benefits

In my experience with non-profits, the key challenge in benefit management is effective measurement. As non-profits often aim to address large societal issues, it’s hard to prove causality (i.e., that our actions are the cause of an improvement and not some other external factor). Using Breaktime as our example again, the seemingly obvious measure is to count the number of youth living with housing insecurity and then judge the program’s success by whether that number increases or decreases. First, that measure is likely tough to get, as we can’t exactly ask every youth around Boston if their housing is secure or not. Second, with federal benefits decreasing and deportations destabilizing households, many factors could increase the number of homeless youth in the next several years that are well out of Breaktime’s control. The measure is certainly worth watching, but it can’t be how Breaktime assesses its benefits, nor indeed how it judges its own success.

I don’t have any direct insight into how Breaktime measures its benefits. If I were their PgMP, I would look for measures that are specific to the program outputs, such as the number of people who complete the program, as well as long-term housing and job retention rates among participants. While a proxy to the greater goal (the end of youth homelessness), this information signals that the intended benefits are materializing. Proxy measures are one method by which nonprofits address the challenge of measuring their benefits.

“Deep Clear Water”

In my experience, non-profits excel at articulating their benefits and using them as motivators for their work. Yet, we are still learning how to mindfully manage those benefits across projects to ensure they’re actually happening in the way we are expecting. That’s the job of a program management professional, and truthfully, one of the most challenging aspects of the job.

In future articles, I look forward to diving deeper into Benefits Management and specifically exploring how to measure benefits effectively at non-profit organizations. Until then, please enjoy this week’s song pairing: “Deep Clear Water” by Gryffin and GRiZ. Benefits, like water, are immersive and not necessarily in your control. I find the song perfectly captures that state of being.

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) outlines a rich progression of steps for turning a strategic goal into a functional program captured in the “Strategic Alignment” performance domain. (1 p.67-79) But what happens if your business doesn’t have a holistic strategic plan? Or you’re taking over a long-running program that is far removed from the current leadership's objectives? If the connection between your organization’s strategy and your program is noticeably slack - regardless of how it occurred - you are highly vulnerable to a strange type of failure. One where you are delivering on the stated aims of your program, but cancelled by leadership because they no longer see value in your program’s outputs.

Well, pull out your “Risk Log” because this strategic gap is something that you’ll need to address. The sooner the better.

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Part 1: What is “strategy” to a Program Management Professional?

Strategy, at its simplest, is “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” The explanatory metaphor that stays with me is that strategy is deciding where you want to go, and tactics (or, in this case, programs) are all the work that gets you there.

Strategy, therefore, matters a lot to a program management professional (PgMP*). Not because you are the one necessarily making strategic decisions, but because you bring strategic goals to life. For those who relish invention, problem-solving, and creativity, fleshing out a strategic aim – particularly one that’s not been accomplished by anyone else before – can be tremendously engaging and rewarding work. It’s a key reason why program management is such an exciting field to work in.

The other significant reason that strategy matters to a PgMP is that dealing with strategy is a key marker in your career advancement. Often, it is a signal of your shift from project to program management. Project management professionals often need to be heads-down focused on creating the deliverable. While it is helpful to know your work's connection to a broader goal and communicate pertinent information upward, you’re not necessarily on point to adjust the project aims based on changing economic factors, etc. It’s the program or portfolio manager's role to coordinate with leadership to ensure that a program’s projects remain aligned with business objectives and update project management professionals on necessary changes. When you start being on point for strategic alignment, it’s a signal that you're advancing to a new frontier in your career.

*‌In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title at work or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, where PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional certification offered through the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Part 2: A look at PMI’s “Strategic Alignment” Performance Domain

To move from a strategic goal to a program, PMI offers a well-defined progression. (1 p.67-79) In summary, the five steps to the “Strategic Alignment” performance domain are:

1. Investment Decision: After a strategic plan is developed, your organization orders a “Program Business Case” created around one of its identified strategic goals. The business case provides a high-level description of the program, accompanied by a business justification and a cost-benefit analysis (including intangible benefits). Your leadership then makes an informed decision on whether to invest in the program.

2. Program Authorization: When given a green light to proceed, a governing body or program steering committee authorizes the creation of a “Program Charter.” In this phase, a program manager is hired – hopefully you – and the specifics of the program are further outlined, including scope, projects, governance framework, and success metrics. Approval of the “Program Charter” by the governing body officially launches the program.

3. Establishment of Controls: Working from the “Program Charter,” this phase involves the creation of the “Program Management Plan” and the “Program Roadmap.” These documents include the precise delineation of a program timeline with major milestones specified. It also involves estimating when the cherished program benefits will start to be realized.

4. Environmental Factor Identification and Monitoring: With the program fully specified, the program manager and team need to identify all the potential external factors that could affect the program. This work begins with an initial environmental analysis and is continually updated as the program progresses. Note that leadership changing their strategic goals is one of those enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) that nearly every program has to watch out for.

5. Risk Management: With all those factors identified, you then need to undergo the semi-imaginative, yet extremely pessimistic act of figuring out “what’s the worst that could happen?” Once risks are identified, you then determine how much each issue could potentially impact your program, and what you would do about it if such a fate arrives at your door one morning. You're also building in risk thresholds to the assessment, so you’ll need to know your leadership pretty darn well. This is another process that demands continuous monitoring and updates through the program’s lifespan.

All these steps rely on a top-down leadership model where a concrete strategic aim is decided at the executive level. It then trickles down through the “strategic alignment” process to become a fully built-out program with known goals, projects, timelines, and risks. Furthermore, this process also relies on the PgMP having significant time, resources, and ultimately access to leadership’s plans (and, honestly, their fears as part of the risk management process). All this assessment, development, and planning must occur well in advance of any fieldwork or projects.

It’s admittedly asking for a pretty ideal environment. One that many non-profits are not in the position to offer. If you are working in less-than-perfect conditions, is PMI’s strategic alignment process still valuable?

Part 3: Strategic alignment at non-profits

In my experience, leadership doesn’t usually hand you a clean piece of strategy and then give you time for intensive planning. That being said, some of the most interesting programs that I’ve worked on were bottom-up. A mid-level manager/leader had an idea, executive leadership said “sure, why not?”, I thought it was cool, and we were off to the races with execution. It is some of the most exciting work I’ve ever done, but when hard times hit, the programs were no longer valued by leadership, and professional heartbreak ensued.

This was a harsh lesson learned, but verbal support and encouragement from leadership for an idea is not enough to carry a program through to success. Your program needs to be tied to a hard strategic goal that your leadership is both invested in and accountable to with their own bosses. The rigorous process advised by PMI helps to cement that relationship and provides the steps to support continuous monitoring, connection, and evaluation. In other words, you're building the appropriate structures to make sure your leadership has little wiggle room to ambivalently pivot or start ghosting you when the organization hits a bump in the road.

In an imperfect environment where there’s a notable gap between organizational strategy and your program, it’s going to be well worth it to reverse-engineer your program’s strategic alignment from the bottom up. Here are some actions that you might have to take:

• Hunt down the right strategic goal: Often, the communicated organizational goals at large non-profits are many levels above your work. Instead of relying on a broad strategic goal that your program can only make a small contribution to, reach out to your leadership one to three levels above you (I like to call them my boss-boss or boss-boss-bosses). Ask about their strategic goals for their role, or maybe if they have an annual performance goal directly linked to your work. Often, the stuff that really matters gets placed in the personal job performance documents more than department-wide announcements. Remember to ask around with tact and grace, as some of this material may be confidential or just held close to the vest. Also, you’ll be doing yourself an extra favor. When you show interest in your leadership, you are simultaneously building up those relationships (i.e. stakeholder engagement) and your own professional network.

• Be ready to advocate your program into the business strategy: When I started as program manager of the Integrated Care Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, my understanding was that the program was formed more as a consolation prize coming out of a tough restructuring. While I never heard a single person ever say that patients and their caregivers don’t need better care integration, it was far from an outlined strategic goal of the entire enterprise. Our team’s work in those initial years was forming relationships to promote the objective while testing ideas for what a program to improve integrated care would actually involve. If you have an amazing and bold idea surrounding a cause you care about, you may need to advocate your program right into the business strategy. PMI’s same approach for strategic alignment still applies, but with significantly more upfront work involved.

• Make the case for a “mid-point review” to build out strategic alignment: I have no evidence, but I suspect there are many non-profit programs out there where the content of PMI’s recommended documentation either does not exist or is inaccessibly spread out across many presentations, emails, conversations, etc. Suppose you are taking on such a program that’s already in motion with active projects. In that case, you can still advocate for the time and resources to build out the formal strategic alignment documentation. Be tactful in your framing and refrain from pointing to the failure of previous management; instead, communicate that a mid-point review or audit is necessary to incorporate new knowledge and updated leadership goals. Remember, there’s no expiration date on when you can make a “Business Case” for your work.

• Be prepared that you may not like what you find: In looking the strategic aims of your leadership right in the eye, you may be opening Pandora’s Box. It could turn out that the strategic goals of your leadership don’t line up with your program; or the cost-benefit analysis shows that your program is a losing investment; or when you write up your program roadmap in full, stakeholders start saying, “It’s way too slow.” Building out the strategic alignment documentation for your program is like taking an MRI. When you look inside, you may find all kinds of scary dark spots that need further investigation. It’s tough, difficult, maybe even painful work, but it’s also worthy. You're doing the job needed to give your program its best chance at success. Only through that success can you deliver the intended benefits to your community, whether it’s addressing the housing crisis or supporting child literacy. At non-profits, that’s often remarkable stuff.

“Wheels of a Dream”

Strategy is the ultimate verbalization of a business community’s hopes. No song better communicates hope than “Wheels of a Dream” from the musical Ragtime. For this article’s song pairing, here’s a beautiful duet sung by Broadway royalty, Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

   ‌

I’m not in marketing, you say? Oh, but you are.

Elsewhere in business, we also refer to this work as communications, public relations, community building, branding, customer relations, or even sales. It is the branch in our worktree that focuses on building and maintaining support for our program. Program management professionals, in fact, are in the business of marketing.

But time spent on creating PowerPoint presentations is time not taken on the next component of your program. And it’s so easy not to write that next email…

How do we strike a balance between discussing our work and actually completing it?

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How important is stakeholder engagement really?

For non-profit programs, stakeholders present one of the most significant boons or busts for the continuation of a program, particularly a long-running one. The ultimate goal of stakeholder engagement is to ensure that when your executive leadership is making a critical decision about your program – from expanding budget to saving your staff from layoffs to considering your next promotion - they accurately understand your program’s goals, benefits, progress, and reputation. If there’s a gap or, worse yet, a negative perception floating around, your program is vulnerable to being trimmed or terminated. In a sniff test, stakeholder engagement is vital.

That opinion is shared by the Project Management Institute (PMI) (i.e., the organization that sets the global standard for best practices), with stakeholders receiving top billing across PMI’s literature. Stakeholders appear as the top principal (i.e., program management value) and the third of six performance domains (i.e., program management activities) in the Standard for Program Management (SPM) (1).

Stakeholders are essential, but how do you determine the appropriate amount of time and effort to dedicate to stakeholder engagement? First, consider your program’s structure.

Money talks

A critical factor in considering effort expenditure on stakeholder engagement is whether your program is directly revenue-generating or not. Suppose your program offers a service and/or product that generates revenue (and, even better, turns a profit). In that case, your leadership has a straightforward way to assess your value, even without additional information. There remains a need to engage stakeholders, but a positive net balance is worth its weight in gold towards ensuring continued support. You do have more freedom to focus on development and implementation because the money is talking for you.

If you are a backline program working to improve operations, stakeholder engagement is going to be mission-critical. Your program is solely an expenditure, and its fate – particularly during a budget deficit – is based on a weighted aggregation of views from your stakeholders. You need the final decision makers to accurately understand a wide range of factors (goals, benefits, progress) as well as have a favorable perception of yourself and your staff. That’s a large amount of dynamic information to relay to people who are time- and attention-limited. To ensure your value is appropriately understood in “the room where it happens,” you need to mindfully and consistently practice stakeholder engagement.

PMI’s best practices for stakeholder engagement

The Project Management Institute outlines a highly structured process for stakeholder engagement in “The Standard for Program Management.” In short, there are five key steps: 1. Identification, 2. Analysis, 3. Engagement Planning, 4. Engagement, and 5. Communications. These steps then result in the production of five different documents: Stakeholder Register, Power/Interest Grid, Stakeholder Map, Engagement Plan with engagement measures, and a Communications Log (1 p.97 - 108).

As your program’s community is constantly changing, all these steps and documents are dynamic. That leaves you with a lot of documentation that continuously needs updating. That’s a lot of work. Perhaps too much?

Good intentions will lose to practicality

This moment is where the rubber meets the road, particularly for a low-resourced non-profit program. Suppose stakeholder engagement is mission-critical for your program’s success, and you follow recommended best practices. In that case, you've got a full-time job on your hands keeping all your logs, measures, and communications up to date. In the most ideal circumstances, you can dedicate a substantial portion of your time to this work. For many non-profit programs, though, you’re also covering project management and Program Management Office (PgMO) responsibilities, and you have little capacity to focus on such a wide breadth of engagement and communication activities.

It will become all too easy to let stakeholder communication slip when you're up against urgent deadlines and fixing immediate problems. How do you create a structured approach to stakeholder engagement without becoming overwhelmed by the work?

Top tips for balancing stakeholder engagement

At this point, I’ve hopefully convinced you of the importance of a structured approach to stakeholder engagement, but equally made it sound like the “Fountain of Youth,” highly desired, but not realistic. For the savvy program management professional, balance will come in a continuous train of difficult decisions, learning to say “no” more than “yes”. Through careful curation, you can come up with a plan that is achievable and ready for the long term.

Top tips for balancing stakeholder engagement:

• Conduct a full-scale review at least once: If you are at the start of a program or stepping into the program management role on an ongoing program, carve out the time to do the Identification, Analysis, and Engagement Planning steps as recommended in the SPM. It’s a great way to get grounded in your community and its needs.

• Make a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) engagement and communication plan: At step three, “Engagement Planning,” focus on making the lowest time, highest value plan possible. Don’t reach for the optimal. Stay practical and start small.

• Use your instincts for the everyday: These documents and plans are not there to micro-manage your day-to-day activities. Remember to rely on your judgment and instincts for handling bumps in the road with stakeholders. It’s more valuable to debrief a negative interaction with your program team and jointly problem-solve than to update a log. Be confident that you can navigate interpersonal interactions without relying on an Excel spreadsheet.

• Block dedicated time for updating stakeholder engagement materials, but in wide intervals: The value of PMI’s structured stakeholder engagement process is that it allows you to see the entire landscape of stakeholder needs and make strategic decisions. Instead of trying to keep a stakeholder register up to date every week, revisit the whole domain every 3–6 months or at a phase change in your program’s lifespan. Large chunks of dedicated focus time will pay off far more than regular small intervals, where keeping the documents updated becomes a chore.

• Add more ambitious engagements over time: As you use your MVP stakeholder engagement plan, two themes will emerge. First, opportunities will come up organically for stakeholder engagement that you can’t pass up. A leader will invite you to present at the next staff meeting. A publication will reach out for an article. You need to be mindful about what you say “yes” to, but be open to serendipity. Second, you’ll get better at managing your program, which should free more time for extras such as communications. Two years down the road, you’ll be ready to start that bimonthly newsletter, and your top stakeholders will be eager for it.

• Look for marketing help from marketing people: Remember that stakeholder engagement is marketing. If your organization is large enough, it will have a marketing or communications division. Use that resource if at all possible. If your program’s small, ask around for mentorship from an expert in social media. If your program involves a large number of external stakeholders, leverage marketing staff to create effective materials for you.

• Use your computer (#AI)! Lastly, but not least, artificial intelligence (AI) and ever-more-sophisticated software tools are providing new ways to create high-quality content quickly. Over the past several years, I’ve developed the ability to create written content with custom images without the need for an editor, graphic artist, or other professionals. It’s been a game-changer. Keep your ear to the ground in professional forums for ways to speed up, improve quality, and leverage new media for communication.

“Come Together”

Honestly, in the real world, I have never seen a superior make a stakeholder engagement plan or manage a log in the way that PMI recommends. But I can equally attest that in the autopsy of my programs’ failures, it was a miss with stakeholder expectations that led to the collapse each time. The SPM offers a structured pathway for approaching stakeholder engagement that is highly promising towards proactively seeing the potholes and filling them in before problems escalate.

At the same time, I highly recommend keeping a light hand with it so you don’t get swamped in non-productive record keeping. Be strategic with your efforts, and you’ll secure higher-quality and quantity engagement-building opportunities than the traditionally “winging it” approach that has proliferated to date.

This week’s song pairing is “Come Together” sung by Gary Clark Jr., written by John Lennon—a high-energy cover of the original Beatles’ song. It’s a great mood builder about working with people. Enjoy.

References

1. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

As program management professionals (PgMPs*), we often overlook the prevalence of negotiation in our everyday work. What’s left is a missed opportunity, particularly as we are constantly collecting valuable, persuasive information. As PgMPs, we need to better connect our performance monitoring and record-keeping skills to our role as the program’s key advocate. Through our data, we can become better negotiators.

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A negotiation gone well

Through trial and error, I’ve learned the value of applying the same rigor to my personal life as I do managing programs. This was, unfortunately, a lesson written in blood. I once had to fire a contractor for a bathroom renovation while eight months pregnant, and ate crow for the poorly written contract terms. I would never have let that contract pass at work. Why did I ever take shortcuts with my own money?

So, now I get a bit quirky compared to the normal consumer. For this summer’s “Project New Car,” I spent an inordinate amount of time cross-comparing hundreds of features to identify the exact make, model, and trim of my perfect car. Once I made up my mind, I cringed at the looming negotiation approaching. But I was significantly motivated to a) get the best deal possible and b) find a way to avoid feeling underconfident.

For those who have not participated in the car-buying process in the United States, it’s a supremely awkward human ritual with tremendous theatrics involved. The salesperson continuously circles between you and the “Wizard of Oz” manager in the back office. Occasionally, lines like “I can’t go any lower!” or “If we sold it for that price, we'd be losing money!” float over to within earshot – even though the rest of the conversation remains quiet. Each round takes an absurdly long time, so you are also working against your own instincts to say “yes” just so you can escape more quickly.

Like a casino, the car dealership has home team advantage and is designed to win. Between my dread of the impending awkwardness and awareness of the built-in disadvantages for consumers, I needed something more by my side and sought out such friendship in data. I didn’t know what that information would look like, but I knew it would be something around fair pricing: enough of it so I could walk away if the negotiation went poorly.

I started ferreting about the Internet to see what I could find. After a few failed attempts (FYI, TrueCar was not helpful), I created an adequate market assessment of that exact car in my immediate region. Specifically, I:

• Identified every dealer of that brand within 50 miles (thank you, Google Maps).

• Checked every dealer's website for their car inventory to see how many cars they had in stock in my preferred make/model/trim.

• Compiled a spreadsheet of that car inventory, as well as any advertised rebates

It took about two hours to complete, but ultimately, I could tell you there were thirteen dealerships in my region, only seven of which had my preferred car in stock. I knew there were only nineteen such cars available in my area, and how many were in each color [(Red (3); Black (5); Gray (5); White (3); Blue (3)]. Further, I learned which two dealerships offered the highest upfront rebates, the best starting point.

Most interestingly, I could see that the dealership where I had test-driven a car several weeks before had only that one car in stock, and it had still not sold. A leading indicator that these cars were not selling fast, and I was in a buyer’s market.

By putting public, but widely dispersed data together, I drew back the curtain to my upcoming negotiation. While I never actually brought up these numbers explicitly at the car dealership, that information gave me the confidence to negotiate hard because I knew – not guessed – what a fair price was for the vehicle and where I would go next if I couldn’t get a good deal. I came prepared and ended up buying a new car on the first try.

Car buying to program management…

Negotiating for a car is admittedly very different from the typical negotiations found in program management. Outside of potentially negotiating contracts with an outside service or salary for an incoming employee, program negotiations are more often about finding agreement on a myriad of small details across many stakeholders. Then, keeping everyone continuously updated on the program’s progress so everyone’s ready to collaborate when disruptions inevitably arise.

Still, I share this story to emphasize the power of data in any negotiation, particularly if you are the weaker party in the talks. As program management professionals already collect all kinds of data, we can use that information to move beyond our role as communicators to become fuller participants in the decision-making process.

Negotiation in The Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) literature

In reviewing PMI’s major works on program and project management to gain their take on negotiation, they do not explicitly define negotiation, but they do mention the term across their books.

Starting at square one: What is a negotiation? While there are many definitions in business literature, my preferred one is simple:

Negotiation is a strategic discussion between two or more parties who try to reach an acceptable agreement for all involved (1).

In a word search, “negotiation” and “negotiate” appear twenty-seven times across “The Standard for Program Management”, “The Standard for Project Management,” and “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).” Key themes included:

• Negotiation is often stated right alongside communication; the terms are used nearly synonymously.

• Negotiation is given a place of prominence as the leading competency in “The Standard for Program Management - 5th Edition” (2 p.22).

• Negotiation is also listed as a “change model” within the PMBOK guide (3 p.169 - 170)

• Beyond this titling, negotiation is dispersed throughout the literature, indicating it is a persistent skill used in many activities of a project or program management professional’s work.

• The two leading activities where negotiation is referenced are stakeholder management and procurement management.

• In project management, negotiation is also listed as being used in the planning, project work, and delivery performance domains.

Across these central bodies of literature, PMI continuously acknowledges negotiation as a core skill set. Still, the discussion of how to negotiate as a middle manager or tips for navigating conflict never gets too tactical.

A deeper dive into negotiation for PgMPs

Everyday negotiation for a PgMP is about playing the long game. It’s about keeping the diverging interests of your project team, leadership, and other stakeholders together enough so that everyone’s prepared to find a solution when the next conflict inevitably arises. You do this primarily through high quality, proactive communication.

This work is completed through status reports, presentations, and agenda setting, where you consistently provide a framing for the program’s goals and progress, while also building relationships and trust with your stakeholders. This diligence then pays dividends when the program hits a snag and everyone’s prepared to make informed decisions and communicate through each other’s stress responses.

Unfortunately, a lot of this administrative work can get misconstrued as simple communication skills, and PgMPs may devalue their actual role in the negotiation process. For example, earlier in my career, when I worked at a non-profit hospital with many layers of leadership, I often viewed my role as a helper and communicator rather than a negotiator and leader. I undervalued the tools that I did have to lead the program.

PgMPs hold tremendous soft power and influence because you are the most informed on the program. You choose what information to bring to the table and how to frame it. An act that strongly shapes the opinions of your leadership. Over time, as you gain trust and experience, good leadership should directly ask for your recommendations on how to overcome conflicts. In the absence of competing information from other layers in the organization, they should be highly motivated to follow your advice as the expert.

The lesson is, do not let your position in middle-management fool you, you are precisely in a position to a) hold an authentic and strong opinion about the best next steps for your program and b) craft a recommendation to promote and potentially defend against differing views from across your stakeholders. You are a negotiator, and the more you embrace the role, the more control you will hold over the trajectory of your program.

Data: The essential ingredient

The catch is that, unlike executive leadership, which can state an opinion solely based on their experience and expertise, the bar is higher for PgMPs. In an opinion vs. opinion debate, the higher-ranking authority wins. The way to be an effective negotiator and ultimate advocate for your program comes through having mastery over your data to prove your point.

Fortunately, as a program management professional, we are already tasked with keeping track of a lot of data. Coming back to PMI’s guidance, the recommendations for documentation, logs, and data tracked are extensive. To name a few:

• Program Management Plan

• Change log

• Stakeholder Register

• Risk Register

• Issue log

• Benefits Management Plan

• Status Reports

These are the types of resources that you can draw from to support your argument for how to navigate through a challenge. It can also give you the confidence you need to face off with a divisive stakeholder who far outranks you. We left my car-buying story in the rearview mirror a while ago, but I’m bringing it back. Because I was familiar with the local car market, I could confidently negotiate. You know more about your program than anyone else; you can use that knowledge to negotiate the best path forward for your program through conflict and challenges.

Negotiation in the age of Artificial Intelligence

As I discussed in my first article, “The Creative Future of Program Management,” Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set up to make the collection, analysis, and communication of all these data sources far easier. The time and effort needed to track this information will decrease, while the amount of high-quality data will increase. With these basics automated, the value of a program management professional will change to demand more complex data analysis and people skills. Negotiation with data-backed recommendations will be a leading skill in the modern program management professional's arsenal.

Prepare now. I recommend paying closer attention to the dynamics at play when you do negotiate for your program. Further, take the time to debrief or document these experiences. Also, look for opportunities to play a bigger role in the decision-making process and make sure to leverage your data. Stronger negotiation skills are attainable, and they will be a must-have skill for leading PgMPs.

Good luck out there.

“The Middle”

This article’s song pairing is “The Middle” by Zedd, Maren Morris, and Grey. Looking past the romance angle, it’s a song all about negotiation. Particularly, make sure to listen for that ticking clock sound. It makes you feel like you're in that pressure-cooker of a time-limited, meaningful, yet awfully contentious conversation.

References

1. Dhir R. Negotiation: Stages and Strategies [Internet]. Investopedia. 2024. Available from: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/negotiation.asp

2. Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.

3. Project Management Institute. Guide to the project management body of knowledge and the standard for project management. 7th ed. Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute; 2021.

‌*In “The Non-Profit Program,” I use the term program management professional with the acronym PgMP to refer to anyone working or interested in program management, regardless of their official job title at work or credentials. This usage differs from the typical professional usage, where PgMP indicates the successful completion of the Program Management Professional certification offered through the Project Management Institute (PMI).

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My murky career

Throughout most of my professional life as a program manager in healthcare, I followed the work that looked interesting. It led me to engaging endeavors and the privilege to spend tremendous amounts of time with clinical teams, learning about what ailed them. Through job experience, I got better at managing projects and programs. I also got comfortable with having an incredibly unclear career trajectory.

There were no set terms laid out for the expertise and experiences that I needed to gain to advance my career. My bosses were doctors, nurses, and even one lawyer, so I couldn’t mimic the preceding generation. Human Resources offered helpful trainings, but little direct guidance on what the next level required. Similar to my experience as a student, I placed my trust in my hard work ethic and ingenuity. From there, I navigated my career by feel and figured the rest would take care of itself.

That plan worked, until it didn’t. Projects and programs failed ambiguously, often leaving me heartbroken, frustrated, and confused. Promotions dried up. Further, I hit an odd plateau where I found it nearly impossible to translate my work into new job opportunities. At mid-career, something had become deeply amiss.

Having traveled through my early career to this other side, I now wonder what program management professionals – particularly those working for non-profits – need to do to be amazing at their jobs. To define “amazing”, it means both the ability to navigate through the deepest challenges in program building, as well as to find ready career advancement opportunities.

How do we become the equivalent of a professional athlete in our discipline?

Winging it didn’t cut it.

Now, I have a hypothesis.

Three arenas to study…

To become a superior non-profit program management professional, you should train in these three arenas: Industry Expertise, Project and Program Management, and Non-Profit Leadership.

• Industry Expertise: As programs often seek to improve operations, you need to know your industry. Its history, its drivers, its revenue, and its warts. You need knowledge and experience with the people who work on the front lines. Then you especially need to understand the customer. Why are they there, how do they navigate the system, and what are their most significant pain points? Non-profits are their own unique snowflakes in operations and culture, particularly as many straddle the line between a viable business model and universal public good (shout out to education and healthcare!). To manage change within them, you need to understand them.

• Project and Program Management: You can certainly learn to run projects and programs through work experience (and many do), but I advocate for further self-study or formal education to gain an immensely tight grip on the fundamentals of project and program management. There will be substantial challenges that come up, particularly with long-term program building. And like in the sciences, only by understanding the fundamental building blocks of projects and programs - such as the program management performance domains - can you endeavor to maneuver them to squeeze through the tightest challenges and gain new ground.

• Non-Profit Leadership: There’s a whole body of education on non-profit management and leadership, but it’s most often promoted to those already in advanced leadership positions. In juxtaposition, get to this information early in your career. If you led a non-profit, what would you do on a daily basis? What does it mean to manage a board, engage volunteers, fundraise? In the immediate, you will pull back the veil of what your leaders are juggling, which will dramatically improve your stakeholder engagement skills. Over the long term, you will prepare yourself for a larger leadership role and be ready when that opportunity knocks.

There are many, many other skills to develop that are needed to succeed at administrative careers in general, such as public speaking, networking, data analysis, delegation, job search, job interviewing, personal branding, etc. While you will need these too, it’s the three above that I predict will make you an excellent program management professional—prepared to gain promotions and face down the worst challenges a program can throw at you.

Yet, I have so many more questions. Most importantly, is my hypothesis correct?

What’s Next?

As a good researcher, I’m working to identify the best trainings in these three arenas and assess how well they apply to the job of a non-profit program management professional. Does everyone need a graduate degree in public health to run projects in hospitals? How well do the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) standards translate over to the janky non-profit sector? Does current non-profit leadership training frame the role of the project and program management workforce in the same way as PMI’s standards? Where are the gaps? What don’t we know yet?

Right now, these arenas are my three guiding lights to discovering how to become an amazing program management professional. Through unraveling these mysteries, I hope that we can have more fulfilling careers, build better programs, and help more people.

“Say No to This”

This article is my attempt at a shorter article. I love writing my ideas out at length, and I’m admittedly brevity-challenged. It’s a real struggle to keep my article under 800 words.

To honor a short snippet of high impact in music, this article’s song pairing is thirty seconds from “Say No to This” in Hamilton. A song whose utility is more about the plot than the musicality, still, Jasmine Cephas-Jones punches through the entire score in her one brief moment. Listen specifically from minute 2:50 - 3:20. The Spotify excerpt posted below captures that same clip too.

The word “Program” is nowhere in the title.

My title was President, not program manager.

I oversaw a Steering Committee, not project managers.

We were all volunteers.

The upfront markers were missing, but my brain began to organize our work into a program nonetheless. Our events and communications became the projects. We started developing repeatable processes that differentiated our events, which began to resemble products. Through repetition and relationship building, we began to grow, creating larger and more purposeful events.

The biggest win is that when I fully restructured my thinking from a volunteer group to a program, the gates opened: leadership, decision-making, and even commitment became easier, and the organization more successful.

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Embracing a program management framework

Often in non-profits, we don’t think of our work in such strict terms of program, project, and product. Maybe we are “just” volunteering, or our job title doesn’t include “program” in the title. Perhaps you are a program manager, but that’s simply the title Human Resources assigned to you. The words don’t mean that much. Further, you are focused on the mission, whether it be producing musical theatre in your community or operating a high-end simulation training unit for a major hospital. Applying a highly structured framework to your work and starting to label activities projects, programs, and products may feel antithetical to the creative process.

In contrast to detracting from the spirit of a mission-based operation, applying a high-quality program management framework to your efforts unlocks long-term potential. It can facilitate easier organization and communication of your work, better decision making, and fairer hiring and promotional practices across your team. Over time, your work will become more focused, allowing you to achieve greater results.

But before getting too far ahead of ourselves, what are the ingredients of a non-profit program? Are you actually in one? I’ll use ANHW Boston as a case study.

The Definitions

The best reference for program management fundamentals is the Project Management Institute (PMI). Here is PMI’s definitions (1 p. 4) for three key words to get to know by heart:

• Program: Related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities that are managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually.

• Project: A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. The temporary nature of projects indicates a beginning and an end to the project work or a phase of the project work. Projects can stand alone or be part of a program or portfolio.

• Product: An artifact that is produced, is quantifiable, and can be either an end item in itself or a component item.

All are technically accurate definitions, but are admittedly hard to grasp when trying to understand your work’s underlying heartbeat. Here are more characteristics of a non-profit program.

Four Traits of a Non-Profit Program

1. A program is part of a larger organization

ANHW Boston, like many programs, is its own little unit within the many layers of the organizational hierarchy. In my case, ANHW Boston is unique in that our group operates within a non-profit organization, which in turn is closely associated with another non-profit organization, Harvard University. We are a nesting doll of non-profits.

To be a program, you need to be a part of a larger entity. Often, a layer or two down the chain of a non-profit’s top leadership.

Essentially, the only restriction is that you can’t be your own independent business. Admittedly, there’s significant overlap in the skill sets required for a program management professional and a small business owner, but your overarching organizational structure is quite different.

Additionally, for new or smaller non-profits, the program may be nearly the entire business’s service offering, but it is still not the equivalent of the accounting, HR, etc., needed for a company. A program must exist within a larger organization.

2. A program has an independent goal

Despite many layers of oversight, ANHW Boston has its own focus – advancing women’s equity and leadership through alumnae-i connections in Greater Boston – and operates relatively independently in terms of decision-making around events and activities.

It may seem obvious, but to be a program, one must have an aligned yet distinct purpose from the larger business. The team running the entire non-profit, ANHW International, is responsible for worldwide events, as well as supporting the underlying structure for the individual chapters and smaller discussion and social groups worldwide. I’m uniquely responsible for creating events and communications that advance women’s equity and leadership directly in Greater Boston. ANHW International and ANHW Boston are together, yet independent.

3. A program can’t be a project

Another source of confusion within non-profits is the definition of what constitutes a project versus a program. These terms are often used interchangeably and haphazardly.

For example, during my previous employment at Boston Children’s Hospital, I observed that the titles of project and program managers were used seemingly interchangeably across the organization. I also recalled reading the standardized job descriptions and not being able to internalize a substantive underlying difference. At this non-profit organization in the mid-to-late 2010s, there was no clear distinction between the project and program workforces.

Program management literature (2 p.37) centers the distinction between projects and programs on two major themes. First, projects create a deliverable, whereas programs create benefits. Furthermore, projects are time-bound, whereas programs are ongoing in nature.

My sniff test for determining whether a body of work is a project or program is to examine its goal. If your goal is “ethereal” (save starving children), it’s a program. If your goal is to make something (build a food pantry), it’s a project.

ANHW Boston’s ethereal goal is to improve women’s equity and leadership through alumnae-i connection in Greater Boston. To work towards that goal, we put on a workshop last year on leadership and creativity. The development and implementation of that workshop was a project. It had a distinct outcome and was finite.

As a teaser for the next section, the same workshop developed a compelling underlying formula for teaching information and encouraging reflective conversation among participants. We hope to use that same format again at the next workshop this Fall. Through the project, we created a product.

4. A program utilizes projects to develop products

It’s taken some time, but through conducting numerous projects, ANHW Boston gradually built out a product line.

Five years ago, the group launched with the intention of hosting social, volunteer, and educational events. We had only a rudimentary sense of what type of events those would be and how to do them. Plus, it was 2020 (PANDEMIC!), so add in the requirement to stay away from each other. We had a challenge on our hands.

We started with virtual webinars and outdoor dining on patios, gradually accumulating knowledge on how to run events. As the number of events (i.e., projects) accumulated, we started to learn what worked and what didn’t. We identified the criteria for our ideal events, learned how to market them effectively, and built relationships that could make them a reality. Often our imagination for what we wanted ran several years ahead of actualization. However, with each passing year, we figured out what our ideal program looked like and created a distinct set of products that now define ANHW Boston.

Summary: ANHW Boston as a Program

Using a program management framework, ANHW Boston is a program because we organize a series of events and communications that collectively achieve a larger mission.

Key attributes that make it a non-profit program:

• Larger organization: We report to ANHW International, which manages the much larger worldwide non-profit.

• Projects: Each event we host or article we write is a project.

• Products: We support five product lines: social, educational, volunteer events; a mentorship program; and spotlight articles (write-ups of local women leaders and organizations). Each product has a repeatable, custom format.

• Project and program management workforce: The Steering Committee members are the organization’s project managers and coordinators, each taking on a role in the development and implementation of the products.

• Aggregate benefits: Although the events and articles are highly diverse in topic, they collectively help make progress toward our mission.

• Repeatable: Our work operates on an annual cycle, with the goal of hosting six events, supporting a mentorship program, and publishing two spotlight articles each academic year.

“Golden”

Despite all those lovely definitions and structures, like many non-profit programs at heart, things are much messier underneath the hood. We’re still low-resourced, volunteer-run, and in development. Even these segmentations listed above are still malleable and don’t tell the whole story. The ability to tightly encompass a non-profit program entirely within a strict framework can be an enigma, even for the best-intentioned.

But while non-profit programs tend to steer towards intractable directions, perhaps we’ve treated the work too loosely in the past. In my professional experience, I’ve seen smart, well-regarded, and experienced leaders lose their grip on managing programs over time, leading to failure. The ability to achieve a program’s mission is an underestimated risk and an incredibly complex endeavor. It demands a structured and thoughtful approach to succeed.

To achieve better programs across non-profits, we need to enhance the skill sets of the project and program management professional workforce, as well as the broader workforce’s cultural understanding of program management as a discipline. The first step is recognizing programs, projects, and products as distinct components. Through hardening that foundation, the people doing the work will achieve more and have fuller, more brilliant careers.

This article’s song pairing is “Golden” from the absurd yet straightforwardly named Netflix movie, “K-Pop Demon Hunters.” If a kid in your life hasn’t introduced you to this summer movie, it’s worth a sit-down on the couch with popcorn. It’s the soundtrack that’s excellent and super-catchy. Enjoy!

References

1. The standard for Project Management and A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide). Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute; 2021.

2. Vijayakumar A. Program Management Professional (PgMP) Handbook. Notion Press; 2020.

For any non-profit program management professional (PgMP), five years is a compelling professional milestone, simultaneously long and still too short.

Looking back, here are five lessons learned from managing this non-profit program.

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Top Five Reflections

1. You have to appreciate your resources beyond money

Despite the “Harvard” name in our title, ANHW Boston has minimal funding. ANHW is an independent, non-profit organization that receives no direct funding from Harvard University. Without sharing specifics, I count our Chapter’s spending in the tens of dollars.

In other words, a run to Staples to make copies is a substantive financial decision.

I’ve learned in the truest sense that the absence of a chunky bank account does not equate to a lack of resources. ANHW Boston boasts impressive assets in its network and brand, which, when leveraged effectively, can yield outstanding results.

We have a mailing list of highly educated women from across industries, living in close proximity, who share a common interest in women’s issues. Furthermore, they pay attention when a group from their alma mater writes.

I also have a fantastic base of committed, long-term volunteers in our Steering Committee. Turnover is typically less than 15% annually. My colleagues continue to volunteer their most precious resource: TIME.

Finally, there’s no denying that the Harvard name opens doors and lends credibility to our cause. Speakers quickly agree to present. It’s easy to build new relationships. In the realm of branding, our name conveys a great deal before we even step through the door.

ANHW Boston may not be rich, but it is wealthy in opportunity and network: the ingredients really needed to conduct our program. From another perspective, we have the assets that many organizations spend considerable money to acquire.

In your non-profit, what are the resources beyond finances that you leverage to accomplish your work?

2. You can find huge professional advancement in smaller, non-profit programs

While established non-profit institutions offer many benefits, one significant downside is an oversaturation of leadership, which can make it difficult to advance. I faced such a dilemma at my day job with Boston Children’s Hospital when I initially volunteered for ANHW Boston’s Steering Committee. It was unexpected, but by shifting my attention to a smaller, non-profit, I found far larger opportunities to advance my professional development.

It began with serving as the moderator for a webinar titled “Women, Work, and Caregiving” in 2021. It featured leading women researchers and writers in the field, including Claudia Goldin, who in 2023 became the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. I may have moderated from my child’s nursery, but being publicly in the professional company of greats was a major professional stretch. It subsequently was a turning point in my professional trajectory.

Next came my elevation to the President role, which admittedly came more from an unexpected need for a volunteer, rather than my qualifications. Still, the opportunity to lead gave me the chance to run a large team and enact a vision for the group with minimal external oversight. Through ANHW Boston, I have five years of highly positive program management leadership experience.

A mid-career transition to a smaller, nonprofit organization may seem counterintuitive, but it can lead to opportunities to break new ground in one’s professional experiences.

Could you find a larger leadership opportunity at a smaller organization?

3. As the program grows, tailoring gets tough

In program management, tailoring is “the deliberate adaptation of approach, governance, and processes to make them more suitable for the given environment and the work at hand” (1). More simply put, tailoring is often about saying “no” to good ideas.

With a growing program whose public profile is expanding, one of the most challenging aspects is deciding which good options not to pursue.

Admittedly, at the beginning of my tenure, we were novices and had few connections, so almost any idea was worth pursuing. Now the group has reached a point where our most limited resource is people’s time – both members' time to attend events and Steering Committee members' time to plan. We cannot implement all our aspirations, nor can we keep up with the increasing number of opportunities people reach out to us to host. With growth, this has necessitated a more structured approach to decision-making, particularly as we aim to ensure fairness in the events we choose to highlight and accessibility to those events for members. Learning to tailor, or in more precise terms, learning to hone in on the truest core of what the group should do, is a skill I’m rapidly shoring up as ANHW Boston expands.

How has your approach to tailoring changed as your program matures?

4. Benefits need to be personal

With non-profit jobs, it’s often the case that your compensation is lower than what you could get in the for-profit sector. For this reason, it’s essential that a) the program’s mission aligns with your values and b) there’s a joy in being part of the community. I would argue that it’s easier to find organizations that align with your values than it is to find a community that you can be part of over the long term. At five years, I’m grateful to still gain such personal satisfaction from being part of the ANHW community.

I joined ANHW Boston over the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. The social benefits were immediate and straightforward: the Steering Committee meetings were one of the few opportunities I had to meet new people.

Happily past the social distancing era, ANHW Boston has continued to be a boon socially. Every month, I’m out the door and into the city for a new event related to the organization. I’ve met countless people from across Boston, generations, and industries. Every time I make a new “3^rd connection” on LinkedIn, I smile. It’s proof that I’m continuously expanding my social orbit.

Working with ANHW Boston keeps me mentally healthy and stronger in my professional network – two traits I value deeply. Despite a program’s mission, if the community you are a part of doesn’t fulfill a social benefit, it’s not the right place for you over the long term.

Does the community around your program bring you joy?

5. There are tremendous possibilities in a long tenure

ANHW Boston is not all roses and has had its share of thorns. It’s taken a lot of determined drudgery to get basic operations moving, but it's grown inch by inch to become a much bigger instrument for change. In an era where we are often incentivized to change jobs every few years, there is a hard-won joy in bringing a non-profit program from concept to reality.

For program management professionals, there’s something important to recognize in spending a long tenure with one program. Over five years, you deepen your expertise and build your relationships to an intense level. Certainly one where you can deliver exceptional work, perhaps even become capable of achieving benefits that no other person on the planet can replicate.

Long tenures often receive little public attention in business beyond a commemorative gift and applause at a staff meeting. However, the value of long tenures may be another underdeveloped area of knowledge that warrants further attention. In program management, you may need a long tenure to be capable of tackling a truly complex problem.

If you spend five years with your current program, what capabilities will you develop?

“Incredible Machine”

ANHW Boston is not yet in its final form, but with recent successes, I’m confident it’s on its way to even bigger achievements. I end five years, both looking forward to the upcoming year of work and still immensely curious about what surprises are around the corner.

Will I make it to ten years? Perhaps. I dare to imagine what I will have learned by then.

This week’s song pairing is “Incredible Machine (Album Version)” by Sugarland. At a run time of 5:01, it’s a perfect way to cap off an article celebrating five years. Enjoy.

References

1. The standard for Project Management and A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide). Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute; 2021.

“Nearly all nonprofit organizations provide a service of one sort or another. The organization provides services by way of programs.”

- Nonprofit Kit for Dummies (1 p.137)

This quote is no inspirational rockstar, but speaks to the truth that non-profits are programs. Sometimes just one, sometimes many. Yet, even with this tight marriage between non-profits and programs, the discipline of non-profit program management is poorly defined as a career. What is the core nature of the work? What training is needed to become a non-profit program management professional (PgMP)? What are the top jobs like? The discipline of non-profit program management needs further clarification. Here is a start at naming some of the professions’ common attributes.

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Technical Definitions

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a program as “related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities that are managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually” (2 p.4). The management of said programs is “the application of knowledge, skills, and principles to a program to achieve the program objectives and to obtain benefits and control not available by managing program components individually” (2 p.4).

A non-profit organization “is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or social benefit, as opposed to an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners.” It is typically mission-driven and consists of political organizations, schools, hospitals, business associations, churches, foundations, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Non-profits are also defined by their exemption from certain taxes, making them more sustainable and lower-cost to operate (3).

Put together, you get this word salad of a definition:

Non-profit program management is “the application of knowledge, skills, and principles to a program to achieve the program objectives and to obtain benefits and control not available by managing program components individually” at “a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or social benefit, as opposed to an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners.”

It's certainly accurate, but it fails to give any sense of what non-profit program management is like as a job.

Finding a Better Definition

To create a more easily internalized definition, my “cocktail party” explanation of non-profit program management is “the work to weave together ideas, products, and services—often in new ways—to help people solve really difficult challenges.”

If a blacksmith hammers and a baker bakes, a non-profit PgMP constantly combines ideas, products, and services to help people.

It’s not a perfect definition (I’m working on that), but it gets closer to the heart of what people pursuing careers in non-profit program management are trying to achieve.

Do you agree?

Frontline vs. Backline Program Management

Non-profit program management can be divided into two buckets: those managing a direct service offering and those working to improve the underlying operations.

Frontline Program Management: This role involves overseeing a direct service offered by the non-profit organization. For example, many YMCAs – a non-profit fitness center focused on building healthy communities - have an aquatics director who manages anything related to the pools and swimming. These responsibilities include managing the swim lessons, a key source of revenue generation for the YMCA. As a frontline PgMP, they aren’t necessarily in the water teaching kids the backstroke. However, the role is essential to daily operations, requires managing a large staff, and draws a direct line to revenue generation.

Backline Program Management: This role involves improving the underlying operations of the non-profit organization. This bucket represents my former role at Boston Children’s Hospital, where I managed the Integrated Care Program, developing novel measures, tools, and processes to improve care coordination for patients and their families. Backline program management often includes managing a team of project management professionals and supporting the implementation of strategic change initiatives. A key differentiator for this role is that it is not tied to daily operations, nor is it directly revenue-generating.

Both these roles rely on program management principles to succeed at work, but they prioritize different skill sets and lead to divergent career opportunities. It’s worth clarifying what camp you are working in when strategizing your distinct non-profit PgMP career roadmap.

Common Attributes

The people pursuing program management careers at non-profits have much in common, regardless of whether they oversee ticket sales for a theatre or develop a new approach to healthcare service delivery. Based on my career experience, here are six attributes commonly found across non-profit program management careers.

I. Mission-based: Not surprisingly, the people who pursue program management careers at non-profits are typically mission-driven individuals who hold an underlying passion for the work. Back to that YMCA Aquatics Director example, it’s hard to imagine hiring anyone who’s not an avid swimmer, regardless of their management expertise. As salaries in the non-profit space generally are lower than those offered at for-profits, it’s not a financially incentivized path unless your priority and interests lie in a particular area such as healthcare, education, public service, the arts, etc.

II. Elevation of Subject Matter Expertise: Passion for a subject area often leads to the pursuit of advanced education or significant years of experience in an adjoining role. Many early-career PgMPs in healthcare have a Master's education in public health. Alternatively, many nurses transition into program management roles at mid-career. The career field is still open for those without a pre-existing background, but subject matter expertise gained through education or work experience is highly coveted in the hiring process for most roles.

III. Diversity of Program Management Training: Oddly, while subject matter expertise is highly prioritized, required training in project and program management is much looser. There are rarely specific educational requirements for most non-profit PgMP positions. In most situations, the underlying skill set for project and program management is gained through on-the-job experience or shown through peripheral activities (sports, hobbies, volunteering, etc.). The exception would be hiring at Project or Program Management Offices (PMOs) within non-profits. These offices generally require a certificate from the Project Management Institute or a specific Six Sigma Belt certification level.

IV. Multiple Points of Career Entry: Program management is a career field that welcomes newcomers at nearly any stage. Many join the workforce as project coordinators to gain sufficient experience to become program management professionals over the long term. Others shift from a frontline service role (teacher or nurse) into program management as they seek further advancement or new challenges in their careers. While few start with the ambition to pursue a lifelong program management career, there are, conversely, many open doors to becoming a program management professional over a lifetime.

V. Gender Imbalance: The non-profit industry workforce is broadly recognized as predominantly female, and there is no reason to assume that the population of non-profit PgMPs differs from this trend. Non-profit PgMP roles are great jobs with no inherent quality that makes them more suited to women than men. Importantly, they offer high flexibility, remote work options, stable pay, and solid benefits: qualities sought out by anyone who needs to manage families and careers. While the balance of family management responsibilities still leans toward women - but is improving with each generation - for now, it’s worth recognizing a connection between non-profit program management and needed progress in the gender equity dilemmas.

VI: Career Peaks: The typical top end of a career in non-profit program management is murky. A positive aspect of the job is that you constantly develop leadership skills, setting yourself up well for executive-level positions. A con in non-profits is that while the number of opportunities naturally narrows as you reach more senior positions, a new pool of job competition comes from the other highly prestigious professionals in your non-profit sector. For example, at Boston Children’s Hospital, many doctors assumed administrative roles running departments consisting mainly of non-clinical project and program management professionals. Further, many non-profits are the oldest businesses in the country that prioritize the in-house elevation of long-term staff. These staffers often have embedded champions among current executives. Job fluidity, or the ability to shift between organizations to grow one’s career, is increasingly complex at the higher levels across non-profits. A unique mixture of barriers for the top spots makes elevation at the advanced levels of program management tricky. It’s easy to stall out, even for the ambitious.

What do you think? As with describing any population of significant size, there’s tremendous variation and exceptions. If your experience doesn’t match these attributes, I’d love to hear from you via the comments section in Substack. Please speak up.

Improving the Career

The field of non-profit program management is paradoxical: both ancient and immature. People have been managing operations of mission-driven organizations for centuries. Despite its age, the discipline is relatively immature regarding common standards for education and experience compared to other professions (teacher, doctor, engineer). I’m suspicious that the for-profit program management career field is also far ahead of its non-profit peer group, and I look forward to exploring that topic in a future article.

My goal with “The Innovative Program” is to contribute to the ongoing maturation of non-profit program management as a career. I hope to better define the discipline in terms of needed expertise, career pathways, and opportunities. I also look to create training on program management that matches the specific demands of working at non-profit institutions. By improving the underlying workforce of PgMPs, we can create better programs that help more people. Please join me in this journey.

“The Middle”

This article’s song pairing is “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World. I played this one a lot in college, so it takes me back—a good song about figuring out one’s place in this world.

References

1. Browning B, Hutton S, Phillips F. Nonprofit Kit For Dummies, 6th Edition. 2021.

2. Project Management Institute. Guide to the project management body of knowledge. 7th ed. Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute; 2021.

3. Wikipedia Contributors. Nonprofit organization [Internet]. Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation; 2019. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization

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The Great Uncertainty Series

Over the last several months, the changes in and around the United States government have caused great uncertainty. Given that much of the work under fire is administrative, program management professionals (PgMPs) and project management professionals (PMPs) are part of the workforce severely impacted by the upheaval.

This series, “The Great Uncertainty,” offers advice on preparing your program and career for the prospect of cancellation. These insights come from a mixture of my experiences with program decline, as well as what I hear from the news and my network around Boston.

Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series, which cover topics such as challenges, advocacy, preservation, and resource negotiation, specifically for project and program management professionals.

Also, a special thank you to Rachel Levine, MS, my friend and outstanding project management professional, whom I spoke to in preparing this article.

Economic Considerations

With a down economy in non-profit sectors, there’s heavy competition for any open position in the field. Finding a job, much less one that elevates your career, will be an uphill battle. Here are bright spots to consider in developing your job search strategy:

Change industries

A glass-half-full look at current economic conditions is that not all industries are experiencing the same decline. These conditions likely have you considering jobs in new industries. While transitioning sectors is intimidating, a core advantage for project and program management professionals is that your skill set is transferable. In any industry, you bring value in your experiences managing projects and programs, as well as a core passion for the work.

The key challenge is that hiring managers prioritize finding PgMPs and PMPs with expertise in their industry. It is consequently easy to be overlooked. In shifting sectors, how can you reframe your resume and LinkedIn profile to showcase your skills and adaptability? In networking, who do you know in that industry who can speak up on your behalf? For the interview, what stories showcase your skill set without overselling a commitment to your original job sector?

Anticipate New Opportunities

Currently, many organizations’ strategic plans are publicly on ice as committing to a new direction is difficult amidst the market turbulence. A few organizations have started to make long-term shifts. For example, General Motors announced a significant investment in developing its V-8 engine at a plant in New York State that had previously been slated to focus on electric motors. This is one signal of more significant strategic changes to come across industries. Behind the scenes, executives are crafting new plans, and when those strategies go public, they will need PgMPs and PMPs to make it happen. Despite being heavily impacted by current conditions, I also include non-profit organizations in this trend. Think long term in your networking: how can you position yourself as a go-to resource when new initiatives start shifting into their implementation phase?

Be Ready for the Unknown

A consideration for the industries targeted for retraction is how far they can actually decline, given that demand for the services has not decreased. There are no fewer people needing healthcare services or interested in going to a top-tier college than there were last year. A question for a good economist to answer is, if a retraction is “artificially enforced”, what curveballs can come up? My point is that you should be ready for the unexpected, as these can lead to job opportunities that you can’t foresee today.

Job Search and Artificial Intelligence

To age myself, I got my first full-time job by mailing a paper packet with a generic cover letter and writing samples to twenty market research companies. One called me back, and "Voilà," I had a job. Within the following year, mailed resumes became outdated as job searches went online and LinkedIn bloomed. Like the shift to online applications, we are experiencing another massive technological change due to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Computer Screening Makes Networking Non-Optional

Job providers commonly use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), where the computer screens the resume. Consequently, you need to design your resume for both human and computer readers. Keywords are in and fancy formatting is out. Further, if you are from a non-traditional background, it is exceedingly difficult for your resume to reach a more open-minded human. As a result, NETWORKING, particularly for those in industry transition, is more essential than ever before.

Get Creative with AI

AI provides a powerful assistant to the driven job seeker, but demands creativity and mindfulness on how to leverage the tools best. Recall that most job searches depend on your ability to gather, analyze, and apply information, both to effectively connect to your network and create persuasive arguments for why you are the best person for the job. An AI assistant can significantly speed up the information gathering and assessment process.

• For example, I uploaded five related job descriptions and asked about the commonalities and differences between the roles. An excellent summary appeared.

• It can enhance the quality of your submitted materials. Regarding writing, I lean towards writing cover letters yourself, but encourage you to use AI to assist in grammar checks, generate smoother sentences, and give feedback on areas for improvement.

• It can even provide career coaching. Try uploading your resume and asking for suggestions on ideal career paths.

Remember the Fundamentals Remain Unchanged

Despite the glitz of new tools, the foundation for a successful job search remains the same. You are looking for positions that will be financially and professionally fulfilling, and your goal is to convince the hiring manager that you are the best person for the job. How you tactically find that job and prep for the interview has changed, but the human side of the work remains strong as ever. You still need to leverage your network and formulate your stories to convince another person to hire you.

Job Search Resource Recommendations

A bright spot in the job search marketplace is that the guidance has become remarkably better - or at least more palatable - over the last decade. In the mid-2010s, I recall attempting to read the dense “Job Hunting for Dummies” to little actionable benefit. Now, there are any number of job search podcasts, career coaches, and resume writing services offering high-quality support on the technicalities of the process. I share several recommendations below of job search resources I’ve used, but the important part is not to go it alone. It is well worth following a thought leader to keep up-to-date on new tools and trends as the discipline of job searching rapidly evolves.

Podcast

The Career Warrior Podcast: Chris Villanueva runs a resume writing service with his brother. I have regularly listened to his podcast for years, regardless of whether I’m actively job searching. On the podcast, he discusses the intricacies of crafting a resume and interviews career coaches. Unlike many smaller podcast operations, the sound quality and formatting are excellent. I also appreciate Mr. Villanueva’s interview style, which keeps interviewees on topic while still bringing out complex ideas of what it takes to communicate your value in the modern world.

Book

I Hate Job Interviews by Sam Owens: Unlike many job search books, Mr. Owens approaches the topic with many personal stories to keep you engaged. He shares his initial struggles with job interviewing and his innate response to obsessively break the interview down to its elements to master the discipline. I related to his stories due to my own hungry ambition to do the same for managing programs at non-profits. The guidance and material are not necessarily unique compared to the next job interview book. Still, he communicates the material more intentionally, giving more depth to the purpose of interview questions and the prep needed to succeed.

Career Coaching Alternative

Mission Collaborative: If you need a deeper mental dive to plan your next career move, consider Mission Collaborative's “Career Design Program” as an affordable alternative to career coaching. I participated in this program in 2021 as part of an alumni offering through my university and had an appreciably positive experience. It is a rapid, month-long set of activities split between worksheets and structured peer-to-peer discussions. If you respond well to coaching and feel driven to find a better career fit, this is a solid option to quickly and affordably get set up in a more focused direction.

“Replay”

As a PgMP or PMP, you are uniquely situated to excel in a competitive job hunt that demands new tools. These skills are literally the day job. Remember to project manage yourself: set goals, timelines, and project plans. Use your analytical abilities to assess the best opportunities for success. Leverage your relationship-building skills to get your resume before the hiring manager. A job search may be the opposite of where you want to be, but you are starting from a place of enormous strengths compared to most other career fields.

As a final note of encouragement, this week’s song is “Replay” by Cynthia Erivo (i.e. Elphaba from the movie “Wicked”). The underlying music, with its whistles and a peppy down beat, reminds me of the inside of a clock and how you feel when you’re having a good run at writing—something you’ll need for the job search.

This is the last article I have planned for “The Great Uncertainty” series. Still, it won’t be the last as there’s plenty to discuss about navigating this topsy-turvy world of turbulence across the non-profit and government sectors. The Innovative Program will return in two weeks with a new article on non-profit program management. Thank you for joining me, and good luck out there.