Scenario: Global Americana Trade (GAT) is a medium-sized global organization with 880 employees, focused on international trade and shipping. Until recently, It has had one Chief Executive Officer for twelve (12) years. In the documents folder, under the title “Fact Sheet,” you can learn more about GAT. The Board recently hired Danielle Simmons to lead the company. Danielle spent a few weeks “factfinding,” speaking with staff, and learning. She has identified many internal inefficiencies that are impacting productivity. She hired a well-known external consultancy, Boin and Company, to do some root cause analysis work. Their report highlighted the following issues: 

• Poor relationship-building practices with vendors

• Accounting and finance practices are outdated and are resulting in a waste of time and resources 

• The finance department is structured in a way that delays payments, creates bottlenecks, and unnecessary chains of command You can see the full report of finding by Boin and Company in the “Documents” folder. The firm also noted that most of these are issues related to technology. Danielle met with the Board and her senior leaders in an all-day retreat in June, and they came up with three strategic objectives to resolve the problems the consultants identified. Priya Desai, the Chief Strategy Office, facilitated an exercise to develop the benefits, outcomes, capabilities, and outputs for each objective. Those can be found in the “Documents” folder, titled “Strategic Objectives.” Danielle also noted that she would be more comfortable taking on more risks once these organizational objectives are met. Jose Rodriguez, the Chief Operating Officer, facilitated the group by coming up with an action plan. The action plan first suggested that three project managers be hired to oversee the three strategic objectives. Danielle pushed back and requested that a program manager be hired to “hold the whole,” and they can best determine how to realize the benefits of these strategic objectives. Since the organization doesn’t have a PMO, it was agreed that the program manager would report to Jose since the strategic objectives were much to do with operations and finance. Periodically, the program manager would need to give status reports to the whole leadership team, including Danielle.

Your Role: After two rounds of interviews, you have been chosen for the Program Manager role. Congratulations! You will have access to a “Documents” folder to do some factfinding and try to make meaning of the information thus far. Your supervisor is Jose Rodriguez, and any memo should be addressed to him. Keep in mind that other members of the leadership team might email you. Appendix A outlines your job description. Upon your first check-in with Jose, you agreed to a tentative schedule of deliverables, which is also found in Appendix A. Jose and the other senior leaders have compiled templates and resources that might be useful to you and placed them in the folder titled “organizational assets.” For this program, it was agreed upon that Jose would serve as your Program Sponsor.

Please submit the following:

• Program Brief
• Procurement Standard
• Program Roadmap
• Program Component List