Project, Programme and Change Management
What the exam tests
Delivering through projects and programmes while managing the human side of change: business cases, governance, benefits, risk and adoption.
Core rules
- Distinguish portfolio (investment mix), programme (interrelated projects delivering outcomes) and project (temporary, unique output).
- Use the Five Case Model - strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management. The business case is a living document, refreshed at each gate.
- Governance: a senior responsible owner, a board with clear decision rights, stage gates, tolerance thresholds and an escalation route.
- Benefits need an owner, baseline, metric and realisation plan; outputs are not benefits.
- Risk management: identify, assess likelihood and impact, assign an owner, mitigate and monitor - maintain a RAID log and review it formally.
- Change management: assess impact on roles, skills and processes; build readiness, communicate, train, pilot, then scale; expect a productivity dip and resource it.
Worked example
Rolling out a digital case system. Reasoning: the business case shows backlog reduction and staff time saved, with benefits owned by the operations director. The board sets gates: design, pilot in two regions, evaluation, then national rollout. Change analysis identifies 400 staff needing training and revised job descriptions; the pilot measures processing time and error rates; the gate review compares results with baseline before releasing the remaining budget. Contingency covers data-migration risk. A post-implementation review at 12 months tests whether benefits were realised.
Traps
Treating go-live as the end; benefits without owners; optimism bias in cost and timetable; ignoring change fatigue; scope creep without change control; and skipping the post-implementation review that would have caught failure.