Team alignment
Can explain the strategies and tactics
Everyone needs to understand the strategic goals, including the key performance indicators (KPIs) and tactics being used to achieve them.
This understanding allows team members to make progress, report impact to leadership and show their effectiveness.
If you can’t report progress to leadership, your team will not seem effective.
Programs are measured by outcomes
Programs are a collection of tasks that form a group of work that may be ongoing. The recipient is the organization itself.
For example, a program of monitoring best practices across teams will report on compliance and correlate those results with a reduction of defects.
Diligently uses a project management tool
There is no one right method of project management. Choose one and make it part of the team’s daily or weekly rituals. A single project management tool is central to the team’s work and collaborative efforts.
Don’t manage tasks and deadlines through email. Important communication needs to be placed in the system, prioritized and assigned to a team member.
Program manager
The program manager is responsible for
Operationalize the strategic goals
Turn the strategic goals into a cyclical series of actions that can be directly measured as outcomes.
Studies the organization and enables change
Program management is about asking a lot of questions, taking a lot of notes, producing a lot of charts and finding ways to map the best practices to the organization.
Reports program progress
Not simply reporting defects, but rather finding ways to tell the story of how the accessibility team is impacting the organization.
Documents their processes
Any program methodology should be shareable with the entire organization.