'For DAD': a programme management life-cycle process

摘要

This paper intends to demonstrate the need for a specific programme rhetoric and life cycle, distinct from that of project management. Grounded in strategic concepts, rather than project concepts, and addressing strategic level stakeholders, both the rhetoric of programme management processes and its structures must reflect the complexity, iterative and changing nature of programmes, as well as address executives and senior management, which are its key stakeholders. Programmes display both high uncertainty and ambiguity and programme management phases must be structured in such a way that they address both. The author has chosen words to describe this programme life cycle that clearly establish its relationship with strategy; they are formulation; organisation; deployment; appraisal and dissolution. All these terms reflect a strategic, long-term endeavour, representative of programmes' nature. The formulation and appraisal phases, especially are close to strategy development concepts, whilst the organisation and deployment phases insist on a systemic an learning view of management.