We present a new article in the series. In this part of the series, we will consider the position of Program Manager, project group leader.

Program Manager is a manager who coordinates a number of interrelated projects (program) and is responsible for the company’s strategic initiatives.

Typical work day program manager includes:
- communication with program participants;
- solving problems that arose in the program;
- collection of key indicators, clarification of statuses on key tasks;
- data and metrics analysis;
- development of further strategies, updating of plans;
- preparation of reports.

“A working day usually consists of meetings with the client and project employees, as well as work with documents: planning, reporting, correspondence with the customer, management and employees. I definitely leave some time for personal meetings with employees to discuss current tasks, prospects, or motivation. Also, part of the day is allocated for assessing the situation, risks, problems and prospects of the program, and thinking about further actions.”

“If at the project manager level it was possible to solve a problem yourself or by talking with a specific person, then at the program manager level the work progresses differently: you need to find people who can solve the problem, and together with them find a balanced solution, taking into account that every change in program projects leads to potential risks. For example: for one of the projects, development inputs were not issued on time, due to which integration with another project will shift, due to which a third dependent project will suddenly find itself on the critical path of the program. A significant part of a program manager’s job is identifying and organizing solutions to such problems.”

Advantages and Disadvantages

Program managers value their position for the opportunity to take a direct part in the development of the company and influence the process component of the business:

“I am attracted by broad powers, communication at all levels, improving relationships with other departments of the company, self-development in various forms. At some point, I realized that sitting and writing code was more boring for me than creating teams, developing relationships and achieving some more global goals than “bugless” code.”

“This position is tightly integrated into project management and working with a team, but the accumulated experience already allows us to take control of a different level of responsibility. The program management level gives the right to participate in the formulation and development of the organization’s strategic plans.”

The goal of program management is to create synergy between different business processes ()

Among the potential difficulties are high level responsibility, high cost of error:

“The disadvantage of any step up is the increase in the number of procedures and policies around. The greater the number of people you come into contact with in your work, the more interests you can touch and must take into account. However, this can be seen not as a disadvantage, but as a large area for growth.”

“The higher you move up the career ladder in project management, the harder it is to share the success and joy of people from the release of a specific product with specific features that delight specific people. That is, a person who added a button to a product receives much greater emotional satisfaction from customer feedback than a person who managed the work of 70 such developers.”

The program manager's ability to influence the outcome is maximum at the beginning of the program and decreases over time, while the required effort is high and constant throughout the program ()

How to become and where to move next

The position of a program manager is the result of expanded powers, degree of responsibility and global tasks. For success in this position, the subject area of ​​project management (PMI, IMPA, P2M standards), knowledge in the field of organizational management, financial management, management human resources, software development and testing methodologies.

Required personal qualities include the ability to make decisions, as well as excellent communication, negotiation and conflict resolution skills.

“I view the position of a program manager as a logical continuation of the development of a project manager who has successful management experience big projects and feels ready to move on. The required skills are understanding the expectations of business and technical performers, facilitating the process of setting and completing tasks, as well as soft skills and the ability to negotiate.”

“In Ukraine, program managers, as a rule, “grow up” within companies. As a rule, introverts who are in love with technology come to IT. And to work effectively as a Program manager, you must have not only technical skills, but also communication skills. Therefore, if a specialist shows himself in this direction, he will be noticed by management and will receive an offer to first manage the project. If such a specialist further shows a willingness to develop his skills: responsibility, the ability to communicate constructively, persuasion skills, understanding of people’s motivation, the ability to plan, then he will be invited to manage several projects as a program manager. A high level of English proficiency is important, because it is necessary to communicate with foreign clients. It’s also imperative to have a good knowledge of the projects you manage.”

"It is necessary to have good experience in project and people management. I have been on a 10 year project management journey. I have stepped on mistakes and continue to step on them, I am becoming better and constantly striving for new knowledge. Main factor moving forward is the absence of fear of the future and the present, the willingness to accept any feedback about your work and draw conclusions on time. Soft skills are the foundation for any good leader.”

Possible career paths program manager:
- Project portfolio manager (the portfolio includes a set of projects, programs and other works that are combined together to achieve strategic goals);
- Program director or engineering director;
- (subject to technical background).

Further development depends on the structure of the company. As a rule, there are three directions of development - in the direction of technology, clients or the company's business direction (globally or locally).

“Next I want to extrapolate IT practices in other areas. Over the years of work, I have accumulated a certain amount of experience, which I want to channel into consulting Ukrainian businesses in the field of using the tools of the IT world in non-IT businesses.”

I thank Oleg Mizov, Dmitry Chernyakov, Evgeny Labunsky, Vladimir Demyanenko, Andrey Melnikov, Evgeny Kotukh and Diana Savvova for their help in writing the article, who told DOU about the position of a program manager. The quotes given in the article are taken from their stories.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack RUS.msi

OM2007_MP_OpsMgrR2_RUS.doc

Publication date:

• The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack alerts you to problems with components such as agents, management servers, the Operations Manager database, agents, modules used by workflows and services so that you can continue to monitor the servers and clients that your business depends on.

  The management pack includes tasks that you can automate to get easy access to common diagnostic tools, such as restarting a health service or reloading an agent configuration.

  Feature Summary
  The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Packs includes the following features:

  • Local and Remote Monitoring of an Agent’s Health
  • Operations Manager agents monitor themselves for events and performance indicators that signal an issue with the agent’s health.
  • Management servers also maintain an external perspective of an agent’s health via the Health Service Watcher.
  • The ‘Agent Health State’ view provides a side-by-side dashboard of both perspectives on the agent.
  • Optional, Automatic Agent Remediation Capabilities
  • If the Health Service Watcher determines that an agent is unhealthy, a series of diagnostics and recoveries can be enabled to further diagnose the problem and event take actions to attempt to fix the problem (e.g. Ping the server to see if it is completely offline, start a stopped agent, trigger a reinstall, etc.). Refer to the management pack guide for more details.
  • Agents are monitoring their own process to ensure that memory utilization is not sustained at unacceptable levels. If this condition is detected then the agent will automatically restart itself to force the freeing up of memory.
  • Detection of Problems and Misconfigurations with Run As Accounts and Profiles
  • Checks are run on a regular basis to detect if any of the management group’s “Windows” type Run As Accounts have credentials which are about to expire. Alerts will be raised, and where possible this will be done in advance of the credentials expiring to avoid outages.
  • Alerts will be raised if any errors are encountered during the distribution of Run As Accounts.
  • Monitoring of problems with Running Workflows in Management Packs
  • Numerous rules are provided to detect if workflows within management packs are failing. Examples of workflows include discoveries, rules, monitors, etc. Failures can range from bad configurations on the workflows themselves, script failures, permissions problems, etc.
  • Reports for identifying drivers of data volumes in your environment
  • Introduced with the 6.1.7599.0 release of the management pack, these reports provide insight into the overall data volumes being processed by your environments. These reports can be used for gaining an understanding of current usage levels in order to establish a baseline and for identifying opportunities for tuning.
  • Operational Data Reporting
  • Introduced in the 6.1.7599.0 release of the management pack, these reports gather information and sends reports to Microsoft on a weekly basis (if you select to send reports). Microsoft uses these reports to improve the quality of its management packs and Operations Manager 2007. Participation in the program is strictly voluntary. For more information, see the Management Pack Guide.
  Release History
  • 5/27/2009 - Original release in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, version 6.1.7221.0
  • 10/8/2009 - Updated release, version 6.1.7533.0, Refer to the management pack guide for a detailed change log
  • 2/19/2010 - Updated release, version 6.1.7599.0, and introduced new MP files to the package for standard and operational data reporting. Refer to the management pack guide for a detailed change log.
  • 6/29/2010 - Updated release, version 6.1.7672.0
  • 8/10/2010 - Re-release of the OM MP version 6.1.7672.0, update of the ODR MP only to version 6.1.7676.0
  • 10/7/2010 - Language pack release, version 6.1.7599.
    Note: Although the language pack MP files refer to the 6.1.7672 version of the English MP, please note that the localized MP guides for this MP refer to the 6.1.7599.0 release of the MP. The guides are currently in the process of being updated to reflect the changes made in the 6.1.7672.0 release of this MP.
  • 11/23/2010 - Updated English release, version 6.1.7695.0

Comodo Programs Manager is a powerful tool that will give you the opportunity to completely remove unnecessary components from the system. Standard software uninstallation tools leave behind files, folders, settings, and registry keys. The more programs you install and uninstall, the more garbage accumulates on the system.

Comodo Programs Manager monitors all installed programs and the changes they bring to the system, and when uninstalling it cleans up what remains after a standard uninstallation. It should be noted that those programs that were installed before using Comodo Programs Manager can still be removed only using the standard procedure.

CPM also backs up files, folders, and registry entries when programs are uninstalled. You can restore any deleted program if necessary.

In addition to programs, you can also remove unnecessary drivers and Windows updates, as well as disable Windows components that you do not use. While monitoring software installation, the program also checks the installed software for viruses.

Owners of mobile devices today mostly know about programs that have common name Launch Manager. Such applications are essentially capable of quite seriously expanding the standard capabilities of the operating systems iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and others. However, almost no one thinks that similar applications exist for desktop operating systems.

Before considering issues related to computer technology, it is necessary to make a small digression. Let's start directly with the term Launch Manager itself. To understand what it is, you just need to translate this phrase into Russian. Roughly translated, it means “launch manager.” Therefore, any program of this type can be classified as applications that are usually called launchers or launchers in Russian, although the second option in terms of transcription is completely incorrect. If in general outline To describe such utilities, we can say that their purpose is to expand the standard capabilities of operating systems by providing access to some system functions in a convenient place for the user or introducing hidden controls. It is known that there are many features in mobile and desktop operating systems that many users are simply not aware of. In some cases, without using specific launchers such as Launch Manager Acer, it is impossible to access some parameters, key functions and settings of laptops. Typically this involves using a default keyboard shortcut. Such combinations can be used to access some hidden menus.

Launch Manager: Mobile Devices

Launch Manager applications in mobile gadgets work according to the same principle: first, they completely change the standard system interface, and after that they group user files and programs according to certain criteria. For applications, these can be categories to which programs belong, for example, games, optimizer, antiviruses, management tools. In some cases, sorting may be done solely on behalf of the developer or publisher. For files, sorting is done by type or extension. So all files can be divided into distributions, photos, videos and so on. In some cases, this concerns control of the entire system, for example, activating or disabling certain autorun features. The most famous and popular program of this type is the APUS utility. Initially, this utility was developed for the Android system. What's not here: here you can access hidden functions of the operating system, implement “smart” grouping of widgets, monitor battery charge and change the interface. Using this utility, you can even optimize system processes at the cleaning level RAM and cache.

Launch Manager Acer: features for laptops

With laptops from Acer, things are not so simple. If turning on the Wi-Fi module and increasing the volume in other models is done by pressing the Fn key in combination with the key indicated by the corresponding icon, then in these devices, in particular on Acer Aspire laptops, it will simply be impossible to perform such actions without using the Launch Manager utility. The problem isn't even what's right installed application provides the ability to access certain parameters. The main place here is given to customizing the configuration by adding some necessary elements directly to the launcher menu. Despite the fact that this utility hangs in the system tray all the time, the resource consumption in this case is not too large, as it might seem to an inexperienced user.

Launch Manager: main elements and capabilities of utilities of this type

Let's take a closer look at programs like Launch Manager. Any similar program will do as an example. It is very easy to determine what it is, and it doesn’t matter for what purpose. specific system A utility has been developed. However, one point is worth noting here: each of these applications has its own set of widgets that allow you to access certain functions of the system. The set of tools will depend only on the software developer. There are several mandatory elements here, such as a Wi-Fi switch, a volume control, adjusting screen brightness and video mode, or using the ECO power saving mode.

Launch Manager: Application Management Basics

Control various elements The menu and display of all available functions is quite simple. Even the rather specific Launch Manager for the Windows 7 operating system seems too sophisticated at first glance. There's really nothing complicated about this. It has an intuitive and simple interface. All functions in it are grouped into categories on the left or right in the menu. Additional windows display current information or settings. The menus in different programs may differ, but the essence remains the same. Such software products make it possible to use not only standard features. Since they are designed directly for the seventh version of the Windows operating system, here you can access system information, system recovery, and autostart control. Also, these utilities can act as optimizers. They can remove unnecessary files and unused programs, while freeing up system resources by unloading them from RAM. What can we say about full control of network connections or activation of security system modules.

How to activate or disable programs of this type?

On some laptops, utilities like Launch Manager are factory installed. To remove them, you must use the standard Programs and Features section. But is it worth doing this? After all, in some critical situations they may well be needed. After all, you can simply right-click on the icon in the system tray and select the exit line. The Launch Manager program will simply turn off, but will not be deleted. However, when you restart the operating system, it will start again. If you need to disable this service altogether, you must use standard system tools. In this case we are talking about changing the autostart configuration. This item is accessed using the msconfig command, which must be entered in the “Run” menu. When you log in, you will need to select the startup tab. Here, opposite the launcher service, you just need to uncheck the box. Then you must restart the operating system for the changes to take effect.

Launch Manager: complete removal, possible consequences

Let's consider another issue related to the use of applications like Launch Manager. Many people should already understand what they are. Now let's say a few words about uninstalling such applications. If Launch Manager is the default installed program, then it is not recommended to touch it at all. If this utility was installed by the user himself, then its removal must be performed not using standard operating system tools, but using applications such as iObit Uninstaller. The advantages of applications of this kind include the fact that they not only remove software components of the application, but also eliminate residual files, as well as entries in the system registry. It must be remembered that after removing the control utility, some standard capabilities of computer devices may be completely blocked.

Conclusion

If we talk about the advisability of using such applications in everyday life, then the opinions of users seriously differ. If, without using such programs, the device simply cannot access certain functions of the operating system, then they will have to be left.