Programme Management
13 posts tagged with “Programme Management”
Research Updates
The Value Hypothesis: Evidencing Design Impact in Governance Contexts
The previous post in this series discussed the claims that the designer's most distinctive contributions to programme cultures are relational, embodied, and normative: the capacity to work with...
What the Value Ontology Cannot See
The previous post in this series examined the product management ontology of design value - the causal chain from strategy through objectives to measurable behaviour changes - and asked what it...
Bodies of Knowledge: Relationality and Norm-Critical Awareness
The Design in Programme Management series examines how designers navigate the institutional dynamics of programme-led organisations: the epistemological tension, the cross-cutting value proposition,...
Why Programme Cultures Neutralise Design
This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters organisations governed through the programme management tradition - the stage-gate reviews, programme boards, benefits...
The Reification Gap: How Institutional Governance Transforms Design Understanding
Gedenryd (1998) identified a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: a gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and how they have turned out to work in reality...
Working With the Grain: Practical Strategies for Designers in Programme Cultures
The preceding posts in this series have established a set of arguments: that many public sector programme management cultures are optimised for accountability and risk reduction, not hostile to...
Seeing Like a Programme: Legibility, Decomposition, and What Governance Cannot See
The previous post argued that governance structures in public sector programmes are better understood as design material than as obstacles to be navigated. But there is a prior question that argument...
Governance as Design Material
This series has been circling around the concept of governance for some time without confronting it directly. The first post described the epistemological tension between design and programme...
Translating Between Worlds: Boundary Objects in Programme Management
The previous post argued that service design offers programme management cultures three things they cannot generate from their own logic: the cross-cutting view, the surfacing of invisible decisions,...
What Service Design Actually Offers Programme Management
The previous post established the epistemological tension between design and programme management: both orientations are legitimate responses to real constraints, but the culture that results from...
Design in the Realm of Programme Management
Programme management in the public sector - and in the NHS in particular - is structured around accountability, milestone delivery, and risk reduction. These are not arbitrary cultural preferences;...
Beyond Technomagic: Domain Understanding and the Governance Structures That Prevent It
Throughout this series, I have developed a framework - state spaces, the planning/design distinction, grammars, constraints - and applied it to the conceptual infrastructure of service design. This...
What Works, for Whom, in What Circumstances? Realist Evaluation and Design's Theory of Change
In a previous post I worked through von Busch and Palmås's (2023) Realdesign propositions against my experience at SCÖ, and the exercise left me with a question I could not answer within their...