Program Management Life Cycle: Three Phases and Six Gates

The program management life cycle has three phases: program definition, program delivery and program closure. This is the structure in section 3.8 of PMI's Standard for Program Management, Fifth Edition. A program is a set of related projects, subsidiary programs and program activities managed together to obtain benefits that managing them separately would not give. Each project or subsidiary program inside it is a component. The program steering committee is the governance group that approves plans, components and closure.

The sponsor approves the charter, which starts planning. Lists that show initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and closing describe project process groups, which run inside each component. Section 3.8 of the Standard names three program phases.

The program life cycle is governed by benefits and strategic fit; the project life cycle is governed by delivering one scope. The Standard says programs "typically begin before funding is approved or when the program manager is assigned", whereas a project starts when its charter is approved. Four differences matter in practice:

• Where it starts. A program's earliest work often sits with the portfolio management body, the group that decides which initiatives the organisation funds.
• How delivery runs. The Standard calls program delivery "iterative instead of linear", because components are authorised, integrated and closed at different times.
• What counts as done. A project can be done when its deliverables are accepted. A program is done when its benefits are delivered or it is deliberately terminated.
• Where risk goes. Project risks are escalated to the program when they cut across components. Our recommended test: escalate a project risk when it affects more than one component or a program benefit. The program risk escalation criteria go further into how to apply it.

The roles differ in the same way: a project manager answers for a component's delivery, and a program manager answers for the benefits the components add up to. If you are unsure which of the two roles you hold, our guide to program manager vs project manager sets out how to tell. The first place a program can be cancelled is the definition phase.

The definition phase authorises the program and produces an approved program management plan. It has two overlapping sub-phases, formulation and planning. A program can be cancelled in formulation, because the Standard says formulation may conclude that the program "does not have a strong business case".

Formulation builds the business case. The sponsoring organisation assigns a sponsor, who secures funding and selects the program manager. The sponsor, the sponsoring organisation and the program manager together:

1. Study scope, resources and cost.
2. Run an initial risk assessment.
3. Draft the program charter.

The charter is the document that decides whether the program is authorised. If it is refused, the Standard says to record the decision and archive the papers in a lessons learned repository.

Planning begins once the sponsor approves the charter. The team sets up governance and writes the program management plan, whose subsidiary plans cover benefits, stakeholders, governance, change, communications, finance, information, procurement, quality, resources, risk, schedule and scope. That is 13 plans, counted from the Standard's list in section 3.8.1.2. The Standard allows them to be combined into one plan or kept as several.

Our recommendation is to treat formulation as a study with a real chance of a "no". Stopping a program on paper costs far less than stopping it in delivery.

The delivery phase produces each component's results and integrates them so benefits are delivered. Every component moves through three sub-phases: authorisation and planning, oversight and integration, and transition and closure. Because components start and finish at different times, delivery is a loop of decisions, not a single run from start to finish.

Two points from the Standard are easy to miss:

• Integration creates benefits. Some components produce benefits alone, but others only do so when combined. Without coordination, components may deliver outputs and no benefit. The program manager may start a new component just to join others together.
• Change has a ceiling. The steering committee approves changes only within the bounds of the program business case and organisational strategy.

Here is an illustrative example. A bank runs a digital onboarding program with three components: a mobile app built in short iterations, a core-system migration planned in fixed stages, and a branch-staff training project. The phases are the same for all three, and the app team's sprints do not change that. The Standard notes that iterative and incremental programs "might have fewer formal activities and less formal outputs", so the formality changes while the gates stay.

Delivery ends when governance decides its criteria are met, or ends the program. Closure then decides what happens to the benefits.

A program closes when the steering committee accepts that the desired benefits are realised and transitioned, or decides to terminate it. The portfolio management body then gives the program manager approval to formally close. Early termination is legitimate: the Standard names a change of organisational strategy, or planned benefits that are no longer achievable, as reasons.

The final report may include 12 items, counted from the list in that section: formal closure acceptance, benefits transition plan, financial and performance assessments, lessons learned, successes and failures, areas for improvement, risk management outcomes, risks that were unforeseen, customer approval, reasons for closeout, baseline histories and an archive plan.

A risk to avoid is closing the program the day the last project ends. The Standard states that "there are benefits that will be achieved after the program closure". Closure only works if someone in the sustaining organisation owns each benefit, so record that owner, the measure and the date in a benefits register before the final gate. Our guide to benefits realisation management shows a register with an owner and a worked rupee example.

The six gate questions are: Is the program worth chartering? Can delivery start? Does this component support program outcomes? Should the program continue, change or end? Are benefits delivered and handed over? Can the program close? The Standard describes phase gate reviews, which end a phase and decide whether to continue, continue with modification, or end. The six-gate grouping is our own reading of sections 3.6.1.8, 3.8 and 4.4.

This sheet is our working tool. Thresholds such as "on track" belong in your governance plan, so set them before the first gate.

Run the sheet before each governance review and mark every row pass or fail. Our recommendation is to check Gates 3 and 5 first, because component starts and handovers are easy to wave through. This is our judgement, not a measured rate.

We teach program management as a sequence of decisions you can defend, then show how to evidence them. We are Augment Consultancy, a specialist in Program and Portfolio Management, and we have mentored more than 6,000 professionals.

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