Program management

Program management or programme management is the process of managing several related projects, often with the intention of improving an organization's performance. In practice and in its aims it is often closely related to systems engineering and industrial engineering.

The program manager has oversight of the purpose and status of the projects in a program and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the program goals are met by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot be achieved at project level or by providing the project manager with a program perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have program impacts. In a program there is a need to identify and manage cross-project dependencies and often the project management office (PMO) may not have sufficient insight of the risk, issues, requirements, design or solution to be able to usefully manage these. The program manager may be well placed to provide this insight by actively seeking out such information from the project managers although in large and/or complex projects, a specific role may be required. However this insight arises, the program manager needs this in order to be comfortable that the overall program goals are achievable.

Program Manager

Program Manager is the shell of Windows 3.x and Windows NT 3.x operating systems. This shell exposed a task-oriented graphical user interface (GUI), consisting of icons (shortcuts for programs) arranged into program groups. It replaced MS-DOS Executive, a file manager, as the default Windows shell.

Program Manager descends from PMShell, the shell for OS/2 1.2, and shares the same icons. Unlike PMShell, which presented its program groups in a simple list, Program Manager opens program groups in child windows using the new multiple document interface in Windows 3. It is possible to run PMShell in Windows by using Presentation Manager for Windows; in that case, PMShell will read the Program Manager groups via DDE.

When executables were dropped into Program Manager from File Manager, Program Manager automatically used the executable's default icon embedded as data inside the .EXE file. Additionally, the Windows Setup program, which populated Program Manager with the standard icons of a fresh install, could also be used to add new icons in bulk after installation. Using SETUP /P from the command line, a standard layout could be installed on many machines in an enterprise using a single SETUP.INF configuration file.

Program Manager (disambiguation)

Program Manager can mean: