Why You Can’t Run Your Program Like a Project (And What Happens If You Try)

Introduction: Why This Matters

In today’s climate of relentless transformation, leaders often find themselves handed not just a project, but an entire program, portfolio, or change initiative. The temptation is understandable. If you’ve delivered projects successfully, why not scale up what works? Just add more Gantt charts, a few extra resources, and maybe an extra steering committee. Job done, right?

Here’s the brutal truth: Many transformation failures stem from treating complex programs as if they’re simply big projects. It’s a recipe for ambiguity, frustration, missed outcomes, and lost confidence from Boards and stakeholders.

Having spent over two decades in program delivery and recovery across sectors, I’ve seen this pattern play out in government, financial services, and industry. The good news? The mistakes are avoidable, and the path to success starts with recognising the profound differences between projects and programs.

The Critical Differences: Projects vs. Programs

1. Purpose and Scope

• Project: A project delivers a specific output: a new system, process, or product, with clear boundaries, success criteria, and an end date.
• Program: A program delivers strategic outcomes: benefits that often require several interconnected projects, business changes, and stakeholder shifts. The end state can be ambiguous or evolve as the organisation learns.

Implication: If you define your program like a project (for example, “go live on X date, under Y budget”), you risk missing the bigger picture: realising value and sustaining change.

2. Change and Uncertainty

• Project: Projects seek to eliminate ambiguity: locking down scope, time, and cost. Change control is strict, and deviations are generally negative.
• Program: Programs embrace ambiguity. They must adapt to evolving business needs, market conditions, and lessons learned along the way. Flexibility is a feature, not a bug.

Implication: Applying rigid change control processes to programs can suffocate learning and adaptation. Conversely, too much ambiguity in a project leads to chaos.

3. Stakeholder Complexity

• Project: Stakeholders are mostly internal, with defined roles and interests.
• Program: Stakeholders are diverse, often spanning multiple business units, external partners, regulators, and customers. Their interests can shift and even conflict over the life of the program.

Implication: Project-style stakeholder maps won’t cut it. Programs require continuous engagement, alignment, and negotiation with a moving target.

4. Governance and Decision-Making

• Project: Governance is hierarchical and linear, with project boards, regular reporting, and clear escalation paths.
• Program: Governance must be layered and dynamic. Decision rights can span multiple committees, business sponsors, and sometimes the Board. Decisions often require balancing competing priorities and navigating grey areas.

Implication: If you apply project governance to programs, you risk paralysis or, worse, blind spots that leave sponsors uninformed until it’s too late.

5. Benefits Realisation

• Project: Success is measured by delivery: on time, on budget, to specification.
• Program: Success is measured by outcomes: have we actually realised the intended benefits, and are they sustainable? Programs often deliver value in stages and sometimes long after the projects are closed.

Implication: When programs focus only on delivery milestones (project thinking), benefits become an afterthought and value evaporates.

What People Get Wrong (And the Cost)

Mistake 1: Over-Reliance on Project Managers for Program Leadership

Many organisations believe a seasoned project manager can simply “scale up” to run a program. While some can, the skillset is fundamentally different. Programs demand strategic leadership, the ability to manage ambiguity, and skill in navigating political landscapes, not just delivery discipline.

Impact: Programs bog down in micromanagement, fail to adapt, or lose the trust of sponsors when the benefits aren’t clear.

Mistake 2: Project-Style Reporting and Metrics

Project dashboards are filled with RAG statuses, task completion percentages, and issue logs. For programs, this misses the point. What matters is progress toward outcomes, early signals of value, and shifts in stakeholder confidence.

Impact: The Board is “green” on paper, while benefits are nowhere to be seen. Decision-makers don’t get the insight they need until there’s a crisis.

Mistake 3: Treating Change as a “Workstream”

In project thinking, change management is often just a line item. Programs demand cultural and behavioural shifts across organisations. The scale and complexity require an ongoing, adaptive approach, not a communications plan checked off a list.

Impact: Resistance festers, adoption lags, and the value promised never materialises.

Mistake 4: Rigid Scope and Milestone Fetish

Programs that stick too rigidly to pre-set milestones or scope (a classic project trait) often miss emerging risks and opportunities. Alternatively, they become “watermelon programs”, green on the outside and red on the inside.

Impact: Delivery teams burn out chasing arbitrary deadlines. Executives are blindsided when the program collapses under its own weight.

Mistake 5: Underpowered Governance

Project governance frameworks often focus on cost, schedule, and risk logs. Program governance must enable holistic decision-making: balancing investments, adapting to new information, and ensuring the program remains aligned with strategy.

Impact: Governance is either too weak to intervene in time, or too slow to enable adaptive change. Confidence erodes, and sponsors start seeking scapegoats.

The Stakeholder Confidence Gap

The cumulative effect of these mistakes is a loss of stakeholder confidence, a slow erosion of trust in the program’s leadership, reporting, and ultimate value. Once lost, confidence is hard to regain.

Symptoms include:

• Sponsors disengage from meetings.
• The Board demands more independent assurance.
• Rumours of failure circulate among teams.
• Key talent leaves, further destabilising delivery.

This “confidence gap” often precedes real performance failures. In my experience, it’s the clearest sign that project-style thinking is undermining your program.

What To Do Differently: Five Tips for Program Success

1. Lead With Outcomes, Not Outputs

Define your program’s purpose in terms of business outcomes and strategic value. Keep benefits realisation front and centre, from business case to final handover.

2. Build Adaptive, Multi-Layered Governance

Design governance that reflects the complexity of your program. Empower sponsors to make decisions, but also ensure independent insight reaches the top. Use stage gates, but make them fit-for-purpose, not just box-ticking exercises.

3. Invest in True Program Leadership

Select program leaders for their ability to operate in ambiguity, influence across silos, and manage political complexity—not just their delivery track record.

4. Rethink Your Metrics

Balance delivery KPIs with leading indicators of value, benefits, and stakeholder engagement. Don’t wait for milestones to report problems; surface issues early, honestly, and transparently.

5. Make Change Everyone’s Job

Embed change leadership throughout the program, not just in a single workstream. Equip your leaders to navigate resistance, adapt plans, and celebrate small wins along the way.

Closing Thoughts

Running a program like a project isn’t just an innocent mistake. It’s a root cause of failure in complex transformations. As organisations take on bigger, riskier, and more interconnected initiatives, the need for real program thinking is more urgent than ever.

The leaders who succeed are those who treat programs as living systems: dynamic, adaptive, and laser-focused on outcomes, not just outputs.

If your program is wobbling, take a hard look at your approach. The solution might be as simple, and as profound, as moving from project delivery to program leadership.