Senior Supplier and Programme Management

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NickC
Senior Member
Senior Member
Posts: 34
Joined: Fri 09 Mar 2012 8:45 am

Hi All

In your experiences, how does the Senior Supplier and the Programme Management role work together? My thoughts are geared towards a small / medium sized business where management roles are fairly limited.

A role of a SS is to ensure that sufficient resources are available to support the project. Isn't this also the role of Programme Management or at least to ensure resources are levelled to ensure success?

We are currently restructuring to improve our project delivery (engineering firm dealing in new product launches) and I am pointing out to the Board that we need a better approach to the allocation of heads to certain projects. This is because people are way too stretched by working on too many projects simultaneously.

I am wondering if the SS and Programme Manager is sometimes the same person? The issue I have with this, is that the SS is our Lead Engineer and we won't want him prioritising projects.

Can someone please offer some ideas on how these 2 roles work together?

Thanks!

Nick
begeland

I think this is a recurring problem in organizations. One organization I worked in - while it definitely had it's issues in the management area - it seemed to do a pretty good job of allocating resources to projects. It was basically a committee that was made up of the PMO director, the director over the business analysts, the development manager, and Director of professional services. They oversaw the following:
  • Project requests coming in from project managers like me who had just received a project and was putting in skill set requests to fill my project team roles
  • Prioritizing of all the projects in the queue
  • The ongoing weekly resource forecasts and usages that we project managers were turning in for our 'in progress' projects
So if you needed to negotiate for a resource (for a new project or for an existing project) it went through them. And they had the insight on overall project resource usage across all projects, they knew what projects were coming in the pipeline (that we project managers were not aware of) and they knew what future resources we might need on our projects - especially if we were forecasting any resource changes coming up or unplanned resource downtime so an allocated resource could be utilized elsewhere for a period of time.

Not an easy grouping of tasks - but except for a few glitches that were painful - it seemed to work.

Brad Egeland
sadia
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Posts: 1
Joined: Sat 28 Dec 2013 7:41 am

Very nice information about Supplier
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