What is the name given to a program or a set of programs used by people to work together and achieve a common goal?

As people’s skill sets get increasingly specialized, collaboration as a practice becomes more important than ever. But what does that mean exactly? What is collaboration?

Although “collaboration” has become a bit of a corporate buzzword, that doesn’t mean that it’s an empty cliche. On the contrary, collaboration in the workplace is what makes teamwork successful. It’s really that simple.

Collaboration is when a group of people come together and contribute their expertise for the benefit of a shared objective, project, or mission. It’s a photographer working with a designer to create a cover image, or a technology department regularly convening with the marketing team to plug away at quarterly goals. In other words, collaboration is the process of group work. But it’s also a learned skill. How well you collaborate with others will greatly impact the outcome of the group project.

However your organization collaborates, it does so all the time, constantly (even now). In fact, collaboration is so ingrained in the way people work nowadays that we rarely even notice when we’re doing it.

That said, it’s worth taking a step back to evaluate how you and your people collaborate. Why? Because organizations that collaborate well are likely to be more financially successful, more culturally aligned, and have higher engagement rates.

Let’s take a look at seven reasons why collaboration is important.

1. It helps us problem-solve

What do you do when you’re stumped? Say you’ve made a lot of progress on your project, but you’ve encountered a roadblock which seems to withstand everything you throw at it. You’re out of ideas, progress has screeched to a grinding halt, and your deadline is rapidly approaching. Do you give up?

No, of course not; you ask for help or find another perspective. You might schedule a brain-storm/whiteboarding session with your team or ask a colleague for their take. In short, you collaborate with your team to solve the problem at hand. When a group of people pool their knowledge, skills, and expertise, then talk problems out and debate potential solutions, projects that were stalled will begin to move forward once again.

But collaboration doesn’t have to be a last resort. Collaboration ought to inform the way your team works—it should be baked in. The more eyes on a given project from the get-go, the easier it becomes to spot problems (and solve them).

2. Collaboration brings people (and organizations) closer together

If you’re finding that certain teams in your organization rarely interact with each other, that teams and departments are operating in isolated silos, you might want to try putting together a mixed-skills team. These are generally ad hoc teams that tackle projects which require people with diverse skill sets and areas of expertise.

For instance, a mixed-skills team might include a product designer, a user experience designer, a developer, and a content writer. It’s essentially a new team set up to collaborate for a period on a shared project. In doing so, you’ve brought together members from three (or four) different teams, created a common purpose between them, and set up connections which will serve all of you in the future.

In short, you’ve used collaboration to break down some walls in your organization, and tighten up connections between departments.

3. Collaboration helps people learn from each other

One of the best things about working collaboratively with people who bring different skill sets and backgrounds to the table is learning from their experience. Collaborating with team members or even different teams should be thought of as a learning experience, and you should try to make the most of it.

This means asking for feedback and opinions, sharing knowledge, finding out how your collaborators approach their side of the project, and gaining a better sense of how they work. Learning from colleagues is not just a benefit of collaboration, it’s the first step towards building a workplace culture centered around learning and development.

Teams that collaborate not only have an opportunity to learn from each other—their mistakes, successes, failures, workflow, etc.—they’ll also gain an understanding of the other team’s perspective. You get a chance to hear their side of things: their pain points, priorities, even the way they think. Which can be extremely valuable as you work together going forward.

4. It opens up new channels for communication

Working with new people from different areas of your business also opens up channels that would otherwise remain closed. Finding new ways to communicate and share information is hugely important to the success of any business, which is why collaboration should be utilized whenever possible to form bonds between departments.

Creating a more cohesive, open workplace benefits everyone because, according to David Hassel, “maintaining regular, direct communication with team members, helps you gain valuable insights into the operations of each department and be able to resolve issues quickly.” On top of that, it brings everyone a little closer to each other and hones the overall mission of your organization.

A lot of collaboration tools, like an intranet for example, do just that. They’re designed to essentially open up your business so that all areas of the organization can communicate with each other and keep tabs on what other teams are working on through news updates, announcements, events, discussions channels, you name it.

5. Collaboration boosts morale across your organization

As connections are made between teams and departments, people will naturally trust each other more, which can gradually boost the morale of your entire organization. After all, organizations aren’t going to be successful if there’s a lack of trust and low morale. Regularly working together with people outside of your own team or department is one of the most effective ways to build trust.

This also works in reverse: the higher your company’s morale, the higher the likelihood that your people will feel comfortable working alongside team members from other departments. This is also attractive to top performing candidates who are increasingly looking for more open, engaged workplaces.

6. It leads to higher retention rates

Because collaboration lays the foundation for a more open, connected, and engaged workplace, it’s appealing to future and current employees—perhaps more-so than organizations that’re siloed and disconnected. An atmosphere where collaboration is front and center is important to your people, and it’ll go a long way toward preventing them from looking for work elsewhere.

Connection matters to people, especially in the workplace. We want to work with people we trust, who understand and respect our points of view, and who work well with others, especially those who come from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Simply put, working collaboratively makes this possible.

7. Collaboration makes us more efficient workers

Working independently has its advantages. We can focus entirely on one project without having to factor in how much time we’ll lose if we get distracted, or how to wrangle a team together in time to meet a short deadline. If the task at hand requires independence, then by all means, go for it.

But for many types of projects, collaboration is just more efficient. When the project is complex and demanding, we have to be able to admit to ourselves that we’ll need help. It’ll have to be a group effort. And that’s where collaboration comes in. It helps us divide up a heavy workload, find creative solutions to tough problems, and wrap our heads around the big picture.

An organization that makes collaboration a big part of its culture is bound to normalize this style of working, thereby creating a more efficient (and more appealing) workplace.

Conclusion

If this doesn’t describe your organization, don’t fret! Creating a collaborative workplace takes time and effort, but the payoff is well worth it. To kick-off the process at your workplace, start with new hires. Find ways to get them out of their team, their comfort zone, and give them a chance to connect with others. Give them projects that demand collaborative solutions. Gradually, your organization will begin to see firsthand why collaboration is important.

A program is a collection of projects that are managed as a group to achieve efficiencies of scale. Just as project management involves the coordination of individual tasks, program management is the coordination of related projects that are grouped together. 

Projects are bundled together into a program when the benefits of managing the collection outweigh the benefits of managing them as individual units. A related concept here is project portfolio management, a method for organizations to manage and evaluate a large number of projects by grouping them into strategic portfolios. Portfolios are then analyzed for overall effectiveness, how their estimates compare with actual costs, and whether they align with the larger, strategic objectives of the organization. 

So what is a program in project management? Simply put, it is a group of related projects managed as a whole unit.

(This post contains affiliate links. Read my full disclosure.)

The definition of a program

What is a program in project management terms? Here’s a definition.

A program is a set of related projects and activities, managed in a coordinated fashion and under a structure that allows for the delivery of outcomes and benefits.

In other words, it’s a bunch of projects being managed together.

What’s the point of a program in project management?

The purpose of a program is to tie together related work.

If you work on a program, either as a project manager, or in a program office role (or as the program manager) you’ll know that the goal is that your work contributes to the organization’s strategic aims.

Program and project management makes it easier to manage resources and expenses because you can juggle priorities and manage multiple projects.

As long as you know where you want to get to overall, you can broadly make sure that you achieve that with the resources and budget that you have.

Project vs Program Management

Project management delivers a single output. Program management delivers a business goal.

Programs can be transformative, although large projects can be too.

I have done both. As a program manager, I ran a collection of related projects with the goal of delivering improvements across the business on a large scale.

As a project manager, I ran complex projects with plenty of workstreams, but there was only one objective and one output.

For example:

Program: Digitize all our processes — this is a large scale goal that would involve many teams and many projects to achieve.

Project: Migrate the accounting software to a new tool — this might be a complex project that affects many staff, with serious implications for process re-engineering and training, but it’s just one initiative.

Program Structure

First, let’s look at how programs fit into the project/program/portfolio way of looking at work.

Programs are collections of projects and BAU work that together will deliver an overall goal. Programs can be part of a portfolio or standalone. They can include a couple of projects or lots.

The picture below explains the program structure, with regards to how it fits into the rest of the project management jargon.

What is the name given to a program or a set of programs used by people to work together and achieve a common goal?

Different Types of Program

Did you know that there are three types of program? Yes, there are! They are:

  • Visionary programs
  • Emerging programs
  • Mandatory programs.

They are all valuable, but each has particular quirks which change how the team works and how they are managed. Let’s look at each of those in turn.

1. Visionary Programs

“I have a vision…”

A vision-led program is where the senior leaders have a specific idea of what they want the organization to look like when the work is complete.

These tend to be transformative programs, delivering organizational or cultural change such as a restructure or fundamentally changing the operating principles of the business (going paperless, for example).

In this type of program you’ve got senior leadership support – and while it may sound obvious to say that, oftentimes you don’t have the sponsorship required in project management, so it’s a good thing that it is present here. It’s very much a top-down approach.

How these programs start

Management will have come up with an idea of the future state of the business in a strategy session, and the program is the practical way of getting there.

There will be a number of projects required to achieve those goals, so you could find yourself working on one of the projects delivering a component part, or in the program office itself managing the overall delivery.

There’s a strong commitment to the vision and what it will do for the company, and you’ll find that everyone gets behind it (or at least, most people) because they see that they have no choice: the company is changing anyway.

This makes the change relatively easy to handle but does mean the program team have to spend more time looking for people who are going to adversely affect the program but aren’t prepared to say so out loud for fear of appearing not to be committed to the upcoming changes.

While it helps in many ways to have such overt senior support, it does push resistance to change underground!

Read more about the role of change management on projects and programs.

2. Emerging Programs

This is perhaps the hardest type of program to get involved with: programs that don’t start as programs but that grow into one by default.

It happens because the business kicks off a number of projects that are loosely connected. Over time, people realize that they are struggling to secure similar resources and that there is an overlap with some outputs or deliverables.

There may even be concern that benefits are double-counted. As a result, a program framework emerges so that everything can be brought together under a single leadership structure, with better coordination and communication.

One of the challenges with this type of program is finding ways to align the projects. It starts with having decent project scheduling software because then at least you can see what each individual project is doing and when.

Then you can start to pull together resource schedules, dependencies and costs to create a common structure. It is possible to do this, but it takes work and oversight, and it isn’t easy!

Issues with emerging programs

The trouble with trying to overlay program management approaches on to a collection of related projects is that you will be trying to standardize working practices and reporting lines across a number of projects where those approaches are already in play.

You’re trying to change the way people work, and to a certain extent, the freedom of operation that they used to have. That can create resistance from the project leadership teams, so the focus for the program manager here should be on bringing people together to see the benefit of working as a program team.

If you can highlight the benefits (access to shared resources, less rework etc) then hopefully you can build a strong program team from the bottom up. Otherwise, this guide to how to recover a troubled program might help!

One way to do this is to use an organization chart to define roles within the program. Get a free org chart template here.

3. Mandatory Programs

Finally, you’ve got mandatory programs of work. There is nearly always something that falls into this category happening at any given time because we’re managing programs in a changing world.

For example, new legislation might generate four or five different things that the business needs to be aware of.

These could be separate projects, but because the legal resources and budget are held centrally it’s easier to manage those projects as a program to monitor the overall position for the company’s compliance.

An example of a mandatory program would be GDPR. Businesses needed to implement changes across HR, records management, IT, Marketing and Customer Services – and probably more.

The outcomes of projects in mandatory programs are likely to be new policies, updating terms and conditions, implementing process changes to comply with regulation and similar.

You are unlikely to be launching new products – these projects are all about keeping the company compliant with trading rules and ensuring you all stay in a job. That makes them interesting, and also as the organization has to do them, generates a fair amount of buy in that makes it easier to get things done.

Quick Answers

A program is created to manage a number of related projects, each contributing to the overall business objective, where it’s efficient to manage them together to get the desired outcome. A project is a single initiative where a team works to deliver a particular output.

A program manager oversees the successful delivery of a whole program. They have to balance the resources, budget and time to achieve the goal and ensure each project manager has what they need to complete their part of the program. A project manager leads a single project, with narrower responsibilities and scope of action.

Book Recommendations for Program Management

Pin for later reading:

What is the name given to a program or a set of programs used by people to work together and achieve a common goal?