Running a successful business takes a great deal of organization, and even more a well established program management. As the word implies, companies struggle to scale unless they are able to properly establish, prioritize, and measure their goals. The act of orchestrating some or all of the projects within an organization is called program management.
Program management can get quite complex and detailed, with multiple tiers of information that need to be accounted for. The ability to visualize all of these timelines, goals, and resources into a single space is vital for properly measuring and communicating . That’s where an organized, multi-tiered platform such as Nifty comes in. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can implement these different templates on Nifty to plan your program management.
But first, let’s cover how Nifty works…
Nifty Hierarchy
To effectively implement your program management into Nifty, it’s important to understand the different tiers and partitions of information. This will greatly assist in scaling the planning efforts to your exact needs. Nifty’s all-encompassing entity is called a Workspace. A Workspace consists of Portfolios which serve as permissions-based folders that organize Projects. A Project consists of Milestones which bundle tasks into an automated reporting entity that judges progress against its goal. Each Task can then have multiple Subtasks within it to further define the requisite actions as part of that step.
Altogether, the hierarchy presents as:
Workspace > Portfolio > Project > Milestone > Task > Subtask
Program Management Template 1: Workspace
Using a Workspace as a program allows you to maximize Nifty’s hierarchal depth. This methodology is ideal for as-detailed-as-can-be specifications that would plan to utilize every tier of Nifty to the maximum degree. In this case, a Nifty Project may not align with your internal understanding of a project, as you may find that you’ve decided to manage one of your projects as a Portfolio in Nifty for more organizational depth.
While this model maximizes informational tiers for a program, this might come at the expense of organizational width. In other words, to track other programs the same way, you’ll need to do so in other Workspaces, which will create the strictest version of access controls as no data (or members) or inherently shared between two Workspaces. That said, you might also view this as a requirement rather than a hinderance.
Program Management Template 2: Portfolio
Portfolios as programs is the happy medium for program management within Nifty. This methodology creates more width than the Workspace model for multiple programs to be ran within a single workspace at the expense of some fine details.
This structure would allow you to utilize Nifty’s Overview tool to shuffle between different departments or programs within a single Workspace, as Projects in Nifty may better align with what your organization deems a project internally. This is the most popular program layout within Nifty, with Template 1 coming in a not-so-distant second.
Program Management Template 3: Projects
This admittedly niche structure is how organizations with a high volume of (often shorter) projects can track progress at scale. This is the ultra-wide structure that helps keep track of a high volume of moving parts that needn’t get into considerable depth.
The drawback to this structure is how much a single internal project’s details have been limited. This layout will typically utilize Milestones as internal project, leaving only Tasks and Subtasks for further depth. That said, for organizations that run a high volume of projects for short periods of time, it allows for a high-fidelity chart of up-to-date information to be created and maintained with extreme ease.
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