Program Management: The Key to Successful Project Implementation
Monika Bochert, Consultant II specializing in grants management and stakeholder engagement
Boulder, CO
When government agencies are tasked with establishing and maintaining large-scale, complex, new programs, success doesn’t happen automatically. Unanticipated challenges can arise, roadblocks can stymie progress, and budgets can run up without adequate monitoring and planning. To ensure the efficient and effective implementation of strategic initiatives, government agencies need program management support they can trust. When a government program is effectively managed, everyone benefits - from the federal program administrators to the public at large. Transparency increases, costs are reduced, and projects connect more fluidly to overarching strategy that ensures program objectives are being met, all the while providing critically needed services to millions of people each day.
With the enormous financial investment that government agencies have in their projects, Project Management Organizations (PMOs) are a key component of improving project success rates, reducing cost overruns, and preventing schedule delays. By keeping projects on track and running smoothly, a PMO ensures a program stays organized, meets objectives, follows through with documenting and measuring success, and withstands audits and formal reviews. When program management services are provided by well-trained, experienced professionals armed with proven standards and practices, government clients can trust they have a partner that is as committed to a successful outcome as they are.
Corner Alliance understands that quality program management is the key foundation to success in all aspects of delivery, from strategic communications and grants management to business process improvement and financial analysis. We put program management at the root of every service we deliver, bringing best practices from PMBOK, Agile, and Lean Six Sigma to ensure we remain organized, on time, and committed to quality.
To guarantee an agency’s ability to maintain its strategic alignment and stay on track with program deliverables, Corner Alliance leverages a suite of time-tested and standardized methodologies, tools, and repositories of best practices, including:
Program Summary Dashboards: To monitor projects and capture lessons learned for improvement, Corner Alliance creates and maintains program dashboards to support metrics measurement, optimization, and strategy. This tool is useful in verifying the completion of deliverables and milestones and determining project risk to decision-makers.
Reporting: We conduct regular reporting to maintain an accurate and current capture of program activities, successes, risks, and issues, and visualize data for quick yet comprehensive review by federal clients.
Project Planning: The ability of a federal agency to accomplish its mission is rooted in expert project planning. We provide the government with project plan templates in addition to maintaining our own project plans to track contractual deliverables, status, issues, risks, and forecasted activities.
Impact and Performance Assessments: Corner Alliance develops and manages custom measurement frameworks to support programmatic decision-making, justify strategy, and quantify the extent to which program activities result in measurable benefits. Our Impact Measurement leverages continuous data collection to design performance assessments in direct response to our clients’ unique pressures and motivations.
Strategy and Technology Roadmapping: We identify long-term technology and strategic needs by using market research, stakeholder working group and interview engagement, and low-cost digital collaboration platforms to build comprehensive, action-oriented roadmaps with a high degree of buy-in.
Corner Alliance’s best-in-class oversight and implementation of program and project management for federal clients makes us the most trusted partner to support critical research, focused decision-making, and maximized program impacts, effectively saving leaders valuable time and energy.
For more information about how we support federal agencies’ program management, follow us at @CornerAlliance, or contact us at bd@corneralliance.com to set up a meeting for discussion.
Author
Monika Bochert, Consultant II supporting the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division, has a mission to enhance emerging technology through public-private partnership. As a member of the Program Management Office team for her client, she has expertise in grants management and stakeholder engagement, most recently supporting NIST's Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program 2022 funding opportunity that awarded over $10M in cooperative agreements.