A typology of meanings: Practitioners views of ‘program’

Authors

  • Stephen Keith McGrath University of Southern Queensland Australia
  • Stephen Jonathan Whitty University of Southern Queensland Australia

Keywords:

program management, programme management, project management, transformation, benefits realisation, change management, portfolio management

Abstract

Previous published work has identified confusion in the definition of the term program. This paper reports on a study investigating the understanding of program terminology within a sample of experienced management and project management practitioners across a range of industries and disciplines. The study was conducted in Australia which is subject to influence by both USA and British practice, without being constrained to favour either, but where any inconsistencies between these influences are potentially problematic. The outcome was that confusion on this issue was found within the practitioner community. Furthermore, this confusion had developed into competition between fields over exclusive usage of the term to the extent that one organization had even attempted to resolve it by attributing different meanings to the two different nationality spellings of the term. No common understanding or definition of the term was articulated and there was contention over whether a program has to be transformational to be labelled as such. The boundaries with the terms project and portfolio were also unclear. The existence of these inconsistencies indicates there is a need for an internally consistent set of definitions of project, program and portfolio to be agreed and adopted across the whole project management field.

Author Biographies

  • Stephen Keith McGrath, University of Southern Queensland Australia

    Dr. McGrath completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Queensland. He researched the cross-discipline impacts of ‘generic’ project, program and portfolio management methodology and terminology, particularly relating to governance, across civil infrastructure and IT. This led him to identify and propose various means of avoiding linguistic traps that generate unnecessary conflict in project management as well as in general management and daily life. He is a civil engineer and Fellow of both the Institution of Engineers Australia and the Australian Institute of Project Management. He has 40 years of experience in developing, planning and delivering civil infrastructure projects as well as strategy and business development projects across the roads, busways, rail, marine and aviation areas of transport. He also led the team that developed the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads ‘OnQ’ project management system that has been in operation since 2000 and has now been used in delivering more than $20B of civil infrastructure, business development, and IT projects.

  • Stephen Jonathan Whitty, University of Southern Queensland Australia

    Dr. Whitty is Associate Professor of Project Management at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. A particular focus of his research is to better understand the difference between how we actually experience project work and derive meaning from it and how we have culturally come to think about managing it, and how the disconnect between these may cause problems when we try to manage modern organizations. Jon has a principal interest in social and cultural evolutionary theory, and his research has helped reveal the ‘humanism’ in the complex behavior of organizations. He publishes in journals and textbooks, and collaborates with a flourishing group of doctoral researchers.

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Published

2022-05-20

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2019): The Journal of Modern Project Management

Section

Articles-JMPM

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Stephen Keith McGrath, Stephen Jonathan Whitty

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

A typology of meanings: Practitioners views of ‘program’. (2022). The Journal of Modern Project Management, 7(2). https://journalmodernpm.com/manuscript/index.php/jmpm/article/view/JMPM02011

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