Why programme managers are so valuable in today’s digital era

Why programme managers are so valuable in today’s digital era

Diverse sets of people need to be brought together. That requires orchestrators

Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN

22.12.2021

As we move towards autonomous driving, almost everything about a car is changing. RK Shenoy, senior VP of mobility solutions at automotive tech company Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, says the company is having to combine electronics, including high compute platforms, with algorithms to identify objects, with software to autonomously run the vehicle, and with the mechanical aspects of the car.

To run such a programme, he says, they need people who are tech savvy, and also have large teams that are working on multiple functional areas – mechanical engineering, hardware, software, AI, cloud, connectivity. This is where programme managers are becoming vital.

“Programme managers need to manage functional areas that are different. They need to handle teams that are distributed across the world, because in no location are we able to have all the competencies required. We may have mechanical engineering and video analytics in Germany, while India does many of the sensors, and the systems to test, and then we do field trials in China, North America,” he says.

Autonomous cars are no exception. As digitisation seeps into every aspect of a business, it’s opening up a host of new opportunities for companies. While the first steps may involve digitising certain functions, the real value comes from combining many of these small projects to deliver an altogether new business offering to customers. Like the way Swiggy and Zomato, for instance, combined our smartphones with restaurant digitisation, and delivery network digitisation to offer us a delightful new food experience.

Srini Srinivasan, regional MD for South Asia at PMI, one of the world’s leading project management institutes, says the digital transformation journey of an enterprise consists of a lot of smaller projects that provide specific chunks of outcomes, which then roll into an overall umbrella that provides a much larger business outcome. “There are a few common threads to most of these programmes. Number one is the amount of complexity. It’s enormous. There is also the need for speed, agility, innovation,” he says.

So, he says, while programme management is about technology, it’s also about people, change management, cultural change, and about cross-functionality – “because everything that happens in a programme cuts across horizontally.” Kirti Seth, CEO of the IT-ITES sector skills council of Nasscom, and the head of Nasscom’s FutureSkills Prime programme, describes a programme manager as a “conductor of conductors.” Each project team, she says, is like a mini orchestra, and the programme manager has to conduct a bunch of these bands to play in harmony.

The programme manager, she says, must be first a business owner, because you need to understand the value you are driving. The tools and techniques must follow. And that needs to include digital fluency. “The programme manager does not necessarily know how to write an AI programme or a machine learning algorithm, but should definitely know what they can do,” she says.

Since the role requires dealing with a variety of people, the ability to collaborate and communicate are also vital. Seth says programme managers should be able to speak the language of their stakeholders, and not get lost in jargon.

SKILLING TO MANAGE

PMI has been working with organisations like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Nasa, to understand the future of programme management. Srinivasan says what they are learning is, historically, companies have chosen their most senior project managers to manage programmes. But those project managers grew up in a particular domain. But the breadth and scope of a programme is more than one domain.

So, today, at the centre of PMI’s skilling platform is a course called Programme Management Professional (PgMP), a global certification that is transferable across industries. It takes care of understanding the technical programme management requirements, and is augmented with other skills around collaboration, design thinking, critical thinking, and business agility. PMI has also created courses for junior and midlevel employees who would be involved in transformation projects. “We are looking at a completely new audience, which we call changemakers,” Srinivasan says.

Shenoy says the number of programme managers in Bosch is rising. About 10% of his 20,000 engineers in India are project and programme managers. Bosch has a tieup with PMI, and Shenoy says certification courses help a great deal. “We also have a reverse mentorship initiative for Bosch leadership and programme managers, where graduates who have recently come into the company become mentors to give us inputs on new technologies. At my age I cannot become an AI expert, but it was important for me to know what its capabilities are,” he says.