Twelve Openings Do Not Make a Season

Twelve productions, one season, and a woman who directs none of them. On her first day in office an empty schedule hangs on the wall: twelve squares, one year, not a single title. It takes the Intendant an hour to understand that her job is not to stage every square herself — and the rest of the season to work out what her job actually is. Program management is the layer between selection and delivery, and in most organizations it belongs to nobody. It does not decide what gets done. It does not do it either. It makes sure that twelve separate efforts add up to more than twelve results. And it is the reason a company can finish a dozen projects on time and on budget and find that nothing whatsoever has changed. Ten chapters follow a single season: from the charter that names not what will be delivered but what will be different afterward, through governance, stakeholders, capacity, dependencies and risk, to the question of who is still measuring the benefit once the program has long been dissolved. Every chapter tells a scene from the opera business and closes by translating it into the language normally used for it — short, plain, and free of consulting jargon. For everyone who answers for a whole they do not build themselves. Second volume of the Operaneum series. The first, «The Most Expensive Word in the House», covers portfolio management.