This presentation intends to shed some light into the gap between project and programme management and wants to help with arguments to support establishment of programme management as a separate role and career.

Projects still go wrong, despite more than two decades of investment in project management research and improvements. Achieving benefits that provide value to organisations is seen by many as the main goal for projects, yet project managers are not selected and educated to have capabilities supporting this goal.

Also, successful project managers seem to lack the attitudes to create benefits and even to understand business, which successful programme managers seem to have. The standards and textbooks for project and programme management focus on different topics, e.g. deliverables for projects and benefits for programmes.

Programme management has evolved as the tool to close the gap, but is not yet understood and implemented well across the board. Too often, project managers are pushed into defining and creating business benefits and align to strategy, but lack the tools and capabilities for doing so.

The tendency to 'extend' project management falls short of understanding the fundamental differences. It is, to some extent, a similar tendency in looking at subject matter experts for the next project manager.

Like lions and elephants that live as neighbours in the same areas, they are not the same species and nobody would ask a lion to perform the tricks of an elephant. So why expect excellent project managers to behave like programme managers?

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