I rather ask for money once instead of going through the same bureaucracy over and over
How merging projects into programs can help you save a lot of time
Contrary to personal life, at work sometimes is better to have one big problem rather than 100 small ones. For example, would you rather upgrade the points of sale in a large retailer as a company wide project or fight with each store manager to convince them to do it, fund, staff and source the project and so on? Asking for money follows the same rule in many large corporations where Finance (and portfolio teams) apply the same level scrutiny and bureaucracy to all initiatives that reach them.
Continuing with James case, when he arrived to the CTO role he shaped with his team a very large list of problems to solve, going from complex strategical issues like the adoption of new technologies, enablement of certain business features, development of new mobile apps and completely redesigning the data architecture of the bank. At the same time, the team knew they would have to cope with a lot of day to day issues like day to day operations, audits, renewal of hardware, deployment of certain applications missing in some countries and much more. This left them with a long list of projects and the challenge of getting each of them approved and managed, which seemed like a frustrating mission in a company known for its complicated approval and funding processes, how in the hands of Finance (instead of an area with more strategical ownership).
Frustrated, James decided for a different approach, instead of fighting each battle he merged the majority of projects into a single program meant to build a new technology platform for the group. A large initiative requiring the resources of all the projects it housed but not the equivalent bureaucracy, it increased the changes of getting everything approved at once and created a more compelling transformation story than each project fragmented narrative. Of course, more money more questions, but the focus of the CTO, CIO and many other leaders into a single problem, story and flag greatly simplified the way to get the funds needed.
I rather have one big problem than many small ones
The new program also had an added bonus, it told a transformation story that later became the flag for the CIO and even partially the CEO of the company. Instead of talking about technology a sum of small things diluted the big investment being done, telling the story of a big platform, bringing a compelling set of new business features and present in many countries at once, something not done before since each business unit had the empowerment to chose their technology, created a sense of direction and excitement not seen before. The team also invested in the branding and internal marketing for the program that brought more visibility to it and therefore minimised any chance of Finance reducing its support to the program.
The same hack can be applied to many things. Forgetting for a second about the financial point of view in this article, think about fighting for salary increases for your team with HR, of course there is a limit but the tiredness and complexity of the conversation for sure doesn’t scale in a linear way if more people are bundled together. Same for technical problems, imagine for example being responsible for the source code of the company, would you rather have everything on a single place or multiple fragmented repositories. Of course, the first one has a bit of embedded risk to it but control, monitoring, security, backups, etc. are easier when the fragmentation is reduced.