Program & Stakeholder Management

I was late to the Oppenheimer watch party, but still luckier than my wife who couldn't join me for the IMAX show and had to do with an on-demand Prime Video version 6 months later. I of course could not miss the chance to watch it a second time. After my first watch itself I was intrigued by the character of Major Leslie Groves and thought to myself what a great leader he was! I had already gone down the rabbit hole of reading about Project Manhattan and True Alloys and Atomic Spies after my first watch, and after my second watch I was convinced that I had to write down the excellent lessons in program and stakeholder management that this movie offers. I for one am beyond awed by the sheer scale of what was accomplished in 1945. And as I finished writing this piece I realized that the awe should be reserved for the way this massive program was managed and not the outcome.

This was a $2 billion program (that’s a whopping $35 Billion in today’s terms) with a 130,000 people spread across multiple countries and sites across the globe, accomplished without a single laptop, no JIRA instance, no instant Zoom calls. You might say that I’m trivialising the making of the first atomic bomb by calling it a program, but that’s what it was. The reason you might get this feeling is because the outcome of this program was far from trivial, and it may not be intuitive to accept that a formidably set up and well run program can actually get you nuclear outcomes.

I have supplemented the depictions in the movie with some additional readings, and have divided my learnings into 2 buckets (not entirely MECE in the practical world but will serve our purpose)

1. Program Management

2. Stakeholder and Team Management

Stakeholder and Team Management

The single most interesting highlight of the movie was the breadth of characters, each of whom mapped to a stereotypical stakeholder often encountered in large scale programs.

The movie in itself is a lesson in program leadership. There are all sorts of characters in the movie, each fitting one or more stereotypes of “stakeholders” often encountered in large scale programs. More than anything else, the success of the program is dependent on how the program leadership recruits, appoints and manages different stakeholders. While recruitments and appointments may not always directly be in the hands of the leadership, managing (upward, lateral and downward) always is.

Upward (US government, Army director)

Lateral (other government agencies, sub-programs)

Downward (core team - )

External (detractors, supporters, curious)

Lets talk about the setup first. Major Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) in the movie was the

When I say best practices I am not referring to the rituals / program management principles which need to be followed by program managers, which any YT video could teach you in an hour. I’m talking about the need for program owners to be seen as expert leaders so people across functions listen to them.

Program Leaders & managers should know content - how do you define content? Content means they should know business need, product strategy, user flows, engineering, infosec, integrations and everything in between. This is super important because only then will all functions have respect for their program counterparts. Without respect, there is no followership, and without followership, program managers end up becoming courier boys. Many program managers I meet do not want to get deep into the content, and think of escalations as the first step

Groves chose the right leader - Oppenhiemer,

So how did they achieve it?