Understanding the Five P's - Part 1

I recently tried to engage the folks at the Project Management Institute (PMI) to discuss with them the efficacy of formalizing new standards that further specialization aspects of program management from one another. It occurred to me though that this is a good place to begin explaining what PLM is and why it is needed. There are essentially as many as five "PLMs" associated with what I'm describing as the new PLMs, these five Ps are:

• Program Management
• Portfolio Management
• Project Management
• Product Management
• Process Management

Some may argue that these are all radically different from one another, I don't think so. We'll take a few posts here to review them one by one:


Program Management is generally considered a general category of practice or related practice areas. While sometimes software itself is referred to as programming, what programs are in our context is the coordination of people, organizations, technology and materials to achieve specific or well-defined goals. A program office may be responsible for one or more programs. An example of a real PMO that is charged to manage just one program is ELSG/EC. This office was created to support the Air Force’s Logistics ERP initiative, also known as the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS). But even the EC has developed other related programs as issues have arisen, for example one dedicated to developing a legacy system migration strategy and another dedicated to developing a unified data architecture to support both Logistics or Finance ERP solutions.


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