Programme Risk Management
What is a Programme? Why / how does it differ from a project?
A programme (in this context) is a collection of related projects which are required to achieve some overarching objective or deliverable. Each of the projects may be a success or failure in its own right, however the feature of a programme is that all the projects outputs are required for the Programme to be successful.
Thus Programme Risk Management has to operate in a number of different contexts from Project Risk Management:
- Within the programme, the constituent projects will normally be at different stages of development at any given point in time
- The size and complexity of the projects may not be directly related to their importance to the programme, and this importance may not be recognised in advance
- Each project will make assumptions about the adjacent / interacting projects – which may or may not be in alignment, and may or may not turn out to be true