Programme Management and Roy Keane

I have a confession to make: I am an Ipswich Town supporter. I know, don't mock, I suffer enough as it is. I have watched over the past five months after Jim Magilton was sacked for only taking Ipswich to 10th in the Championship, and Roy Keane brought in with a great fanfare as the man to put an end to Ipswich's "underperforming" and win promotion to the Premiership.

He immediately professed himself satisfied that the core of his squad was sound, and that he was confident of winning promotion within 2 years. Since then, he has acquired I think 9 new players - I tend to blink now and again and miss one - and has transformed the team into one making a realistic challenge for - er, relegation, actually, bottom of the table in 24th place.

Now I have in my career a few times been introduced as a replacement IT programme manager for a failing project and told to improve matters. On one or two occasions, I have also been told to reduce costs because the budget was already overspent. As any PM knows, you can only juggle with four basic parameters: cost, timescale, quality, scope. And what is more, these are closely linked - you can't change one without affecting another. Reduce cost? OK, then unless you are a magician with higher productivity yet cheaper resources to produce out of the hat, at least one of the other three must move in balance. Now in Roy's case, he has an increased budget, a fixed timescale, pretty much a fixed scope, and so should see quality increase. The jury is still out on that one, but it now looks pretty unlikely that he will win promotion in his first year - indeed, I begin to be a bit nervous as to whether he will keep us in the Championship at the other end. At least the scope was set as 'within 2 years'.

So I started to think around some of the similarities between the roles of Programme Manager and Football Manager. Broadly, Roy has three main communities to keep satisfied: his team's chairman and board of directors (in Ipswich's case, the owner, Marcus Evans); the players; and the fans. That ties in nicely with a PM, who also relates to three communities: the "chairman" (usually the COO or CIO) and a Programme Board of business stakeholders; the implementation team; and the user community. Let's look at how these relationships work.

No outsider really knows what Roy's relationship is like with his Chairman and Directors, and indeed they shouldn't. Similarly, a PM will keep that a confidential relationship. In both cases, the approach, costs versus budget and performance against planned milestones must be reported, progress highlighted and shortfalls explained, and sufficient confidence in your competence and performance maintained.

With both the players and the implementation team, the Manager has to build the right environment for them to be as able as possible to do their job, then structure them and set objectives and priorities, and of course ensure that as far as possible the best resources are part of the team. An important part of that is motivation, and giving them the confidence to deliver their part. Now, often a "parachute PM" dropped into an existing team has limited ability to execute rapid large-scale change of the environment and the resources, so the key is to ensure the structure is right, the objectives are appropriate and achievable, and that the team morale is lifted to the optimum level. In Roy's case, we have to assume he is capable of creating the right team structure and delivering the motivation - his track record with Sunderland, and the fact that several Sunderland players wanted to rejoin him at Ipswich suggest that is the case.

So what about the final community - the fans/users? In both cases it is harder to win wholehearted support than doubt and criticism. In both cases too the community responds to results - or lack of them. Here the PM has a marginal advantage over the football manager, in that the latter has to deliver results once or twice a week, whereas the PM's deliveries are normally months apart. Clearly Roy Keane has what is hopefully a temporary problem in this regard, and the opinion of the fans is clearly getting a little frayed.

What is key in both cases is that the right message must be communicated to all communities. A PM has to make this happen, ensure the opportunity and the timing are appropriate, and that the message is exactly right. The football manager has to do this for two of his communities, but the fans are normally addressed through the media, which is a much tougher proposition. Getting the message right here is harder because it is not possible to pick the moment, and the resulting message is all too often interpreted the way the press want to present it, not necessarily how the manager intended it. In this regard, Roy has done better than I expected - his TV interviews have been thoughtful, and whilst some may consider him too dispassionate, I have been fairly impressed with his control and care with words.

Now all both he and I need to do is to deliver...

Tweet