Release 5: Capital Venture and Programme Management

I have been reading about Venture Capital lately, and I also found 2 nice articles on Programme Management (the first one by Anthony Plewes tries and sell the virtues of Programme Management and how control is "good", the second one by Martin Brampton is quite opposite and reviews the reasons why Programme Management is "bad").

Eventually, we can argue that VC and Programme Management are basically trying to achieve the same goal: generating value.

For a VC, the value is calculated in strict monetary ROI terms, where a Programme Management board may have to take into consideration more that one value type for its prioritisation and planning (although once again, we can argue that any value type will/should eventually convert in monetary terms). But essentially they have the same constraints (finite budget per time period), and the same goal.

In my view, VC is probably the most evolved organised and institutionalised way of generating value today: a company or person with availble funds will look at ideas and capabilities of others that do require some funding that they do not currently have. According to the state of the idea, the VC will agree to fund value generating activities to make this idea a reality, grabing shares and future profits in the process. Typically, an idea will go from SEED to STARTUP to ROUND 1, ROUND 2... In this post, I will not talk about the exit strategies that need to be considered when a one requires access to VC funding.

Now, isn't the value game the same that we are trying to play in organisations?

Although the philosophy of Programme Management say it should support ideas from inception to delivery, I have seen very little proof that this is commonly implemented in large organisations. The way most Programme Management approaches are implemented today do no encourage SEED, they don't really support STARTUP ideas, they will focus on ROUND 1 and not thinks that there could be a ROUND 2, 3, 4...

VC and the ways to get access to it follow an iterative process!

The day we get Programme Offices to act like VCs in their respective organisations, the need to execute each phase within the time frame of each Programme Iteration will push forward Agile delivery practices.

Venture Capitalism is probably perverted nowadays (see and example of this in Peter Cochrane's article "The decline of Western technology?". There is very little or no risk taken by those boys. They will go after the no-risk high ROI opportunities: they will go for the obvious and forget the revolutionary. mmmhhh.

After all, they are behaving like Programme Management Offices do...