Sherry Garg

Program management and project management is less about solving technical problems - that's the easy part. A lot of folks who want to join this industry are always focusing on execution, building project plans and program plans, and how to execute that plan to meet milestones or goals. What I always tell people who want to enter this industry is that it's really about focusing more on the why and what. Once you have that figured out, you have clarity on why we are doing this, and you are able to not only understand it for yourself, but also translate it to your teams, half the battle is won. That helps your team understand where they fit in the puzzle, what their role is, if the why is clear. And then, how will follow. Of course, there is tactical execution, but a big part of program management is really aligning all these different stakeholders, making sure that everybody's working towards the same goal. So it's a lot of cross-functional alignment, and oftentimes we tend to overlook that and focus more on deliverables, more tangible technical deliverables. When I first started, I was also very focused on execution, and then often missing the why and planning and alignment, stakeholder alignment piece. As I grew in my career and started working on more complex enterprise-level initiatives, I learned that it all starts with the why, and then stakeholder alignment, and everything else kind of follows.