Program Management: Enabling Value Driven Change

Offered By: University System of Maryland via edX

Course Description

Overview

The execution of strategies in the changing world of work is going through an evolution. This transition is getting faster and more complex. Tomorrow’s leaders and program managers have not been created yet. At the center of their creation is developing the adaptive mindsets that see opportunities in chaos, connect and unite hearts, and apply focused resilient execution that achieves meaningful benefits faster. The future program managers are going to possess big picture, strategic and integration capabilities and a crystal-clear focus on value. They must be able to achieve this across a set of the moving components of change initiatives.

As leaders, program managers must connect teams of teams, across multiple projects, to discover and deliver sustainable business solutions and create with their teams the next practices. Accomplishing efficient and effective program work for their organization requires integrative thinking and can be overwhelming without the frameworks, program management tools, and skills that this program management certificate provides.

This certificate takes a global perspective and brings life to the principles and practices of successful program management. This enables professionals and their organizations to experience the potential this discipline brings to the way people work. Program participants learn the understanding of how the strategic plans and organizational cultures become more execution aligned and how to enhance the experiences encountered by their customers and other stakeholders.

A multitude of capabilities around managing and leading change, integration aptitude, strategy execution, and relentless focus on achieving customer centricity and value, will be demonstrated.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Program Management Fundamentals – Governing with Excellence to Drive Strategic Change

Learn the practices behind program delivery excellence, stretch your ability to connect program stakeholders to purpose, achieve meaningful change, stay focused on the program’s mission, then drive integration successfully across program teams. Overall program understanding will be accomplished with strong links to portfolio management and project management.

Course 2: The Program Manager – Applying Power Skills and Digital Enablers to Create Continual Change

Learn the practices surrounding the creation of a healthy change culture, explore the power and leadership skills future leaders must possess, appreciate how various leadership roles and digitalization contributes to program managers’ success, and practice how to become an effective leader and balance the human and connected demands for the future of work.

Course 3: The Program Management Office (PMO) - The Strategy Execution Arm

Learn to create a value-driven way of working that is hybrid and focused on the fitting context for program teams’ success. Explore the project management methodologies and skills needed to build risk-based, light governance for making fast, quality decisions; and how the PMO drives resource allocation and creates the enterprise learning engine for guiding continual program delivery improvements.

Course 4: Creating an Organizational Change Management Framework - Transforming Strategy Execution to Realize Program Value

Learn the key ingredients of realizing program value, enable managing change across complex stakeholders and understand the change management processes. Successfully implementing change is built on healthy project management and strategy execution practices and connecting the dots across change initiatives while working closely with the management team. Achieving the buy-in of key stakeholders by building on best practices techniques like Kotter is necessary to become the future change scientist. Successful change is the art and practice of creating and testing changes that can be scaled up across the enterprise, and exploring and mastering the achievement of sponsorship for the aspired change management model. You will learn to develop the sense of urgency that differentiates you and your team members as you work on leading change resulting from complex missions such as new technology and mergers and acquisitions. Setting clear change milestones and using proven change methodologies will help you adapt to meet the ever-increasing speed of change in stakeholder demands and focus on profitability.

Courses

2 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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A 2015 Harvard Business Review study (Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, Charles Sull - Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It) explored in-depth the specific reasons why strategies that are carefully crafted nevertheless falter in the execution phase.
- The worst scenario – no culture for supporting the benefits realization of Critical Success Enablers (CSEs);
- Brene Brown, the Man in the Arena, reflects on how important being in the trenches enables understanding benefits and being courageous enough to drive impactful program change.
In this course, you will join change leaders and learn the key principles of successful change management. You will understand the principles of change management as the foundation for creating the change readiness and benefits achievement culture. Challenging the status quo, building on key principles such as the Prosci ones, will increase alignment to business strategies and be anchored in governance excellence and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) rigor. This will allow you, over four weeks, to understand how to work with senior executives to drive enterprise change and practice the role of being a change scientist. Change agents who are able to use data and trends, balanced with diverse human expertise, will succeed in utilizing a structured approach for securing project deliverables and designing and adapting successful program delivery roadmaps resulting in achieving major changes.
23 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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Programs fail before they start, and there is a good reason for that. The relationships amongst portfolios, programs, and projects are not understood well nor is the role of programs in achieving change aspirations.
- Today nearly 70% of Digital Transformation programs fail and the reasons seem to be addressed as a guessing game;
- The likelihood of being in the 30% successful bucket hinges on the leadership qualities of the program team and the clear program vision and purpose supported by value-driven roadmaps.
In this course, you will learn key program management principles, leadership skills, roles, mechanics, and supporting cultural attributes. This will provide you, over four weeks, the foundational understanding of the program management and program lifecycle role in executing strategies, successfully driving initiatives, developing an exploring mindset, and uncovering program management fundamental templates and toolsets, such as the Work Breakdown Structure, and skill sets, such as customer focus, applied in the real world.
2 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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Organizations and stakeholders are having to simplify, break molds, and remove resistance to delivering faster at scale. Program Management Office (PMO) is the entity that can bring this leadership and provide ownership. The type of PMO affects what success looks like strategically for the enterprise.

In order to reach a 10X organization, leaders who understand the business and operational models and what enhancements they require are vital.
- The pressure to reach a 10X plus organization is requiring leaders who understand the business and operational models and what enhancements are vital by using value-driven roadmaps;
- Studies have shown that 95% of the decisions we make are the result of an intuitive approach and not of rational logic. Addressing program biases and enhancing experimentation will contribute to our sustained relevance of program management in the marketplace.
In this course, you will learn how organizations are having to simplify, break molds, use meaningful templates, and remove resistance to deliver programs faster at scale. Focusing on project performance and getting the PMO to take the lead in maintaining standards and enhancing the quality of our investment decisions and the proper cascading of those choices are critical successful execution measures. The portfolio management view will provide you with critical risk-based governance skills and a practical understanding of how to build hybrid program teams. Change management and transformation initiatives solve complex issues and you will learn how to contribute to building and driving learning and continuously improving future organizations.
3 reviews
4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week
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The future of business is change-focused. Multiple facts are disrupting tomorrow’s organizations and if they are not change-ready, they will fail.
- The ratio of changing the business to running the business will be much higher in future organizations;
- Programs success is now clearly centered on stakeholder satisfaction;
- The skills revolution is here to stay
In this course, you will get the skills you need and learn how to become a changemaker possessing strong communication skills and soft skills to build a culture that continuously aligns the program team members to the NorthStar of a given organizational transformation journey. As a great leader, you will understand different leadership styles and how to work in a cross-functional way across multiple projects contributing to a program’s vision. Over four weeks, you become a better leader by understanding the critical role of program stakeholders and ways to prioritize your engagement strategies. In addition to learning the mix of power skills for operating in future organizations, you will balance that learning with the role of digitalization in time management and changing where program managers will be spending their time to create the most program value in the future.

Taught by

Al Zeitoun