After watching the previous web lectures, we are now familiar with Program management and all the elements of the project that it brings together. In this section, we summarized important elements that may be considered in your management summary:

• Problem: how would you precisely sketch the main issues of your river system?

• Goal(s): how would you state the most desirable relationship between your river system and society regarding mutual advantage?

• Lead Time of your program: approximate how many years your program would span to make a difference in water safety (e.g.:5, 10, 15, or 20 years)?

• Scope of analysis: the time horizon of the analysis is decisive for the diagnosis of the situation and the type of solutions that will be offered in your program. Please note: this time horizon and the time horizon is, of course, considerably longer than the lead time of the project itself. It could be classified as:

– Idealistic: based on the moral position of being a good ancestor. Seven generations: taking into account the needs of actors of future generations (e.g.: 200+ years); 

– Realistic: climate change is an ultra-long-term concern: taking into account the changes in our river system are driven by climate change in the characteristics of our river in terms of centuries (e.g.: 100-200 years); 

– Practical: taking into account that infrastructural investments of the planned interventions are (e.g.: in 30-40 years)

Safety norms: what is the relation between the norms and the program you are preparing? You can formulate the outcome in terms of what kind of event you want your water safety system to be dimensioned on. Please realize that this is always a trade-off. The higher your safety ambitions are, or more precise: the more significant the leap between your current norms and newly formulated norms, the more complex and expensive the program will become. It could be 1500, 150, or 15-year event, for example.

Scale: your scale is based on the previous answers. It could be a watershed, national or regional, for example.

Number of Projects: knowing what the performance of your projects was in terms of lowering the local mean high water in assignment 2, you can make an educated guess on how many projects you would need to meet the overarching goal of improved water safety. Your answer may very well be a range.

Budget: What percentage of the GNP of your country could water safety/river basin management reasonably take up? To calculate the budget, you can find out in your National Balance on Google what this percentage is today, and make an informed estimation of what this percentage should be facing the challenges you meet.

Inhabitants: to calculate the inhabitants, you can estimate the amount of people (in millions) living in your program area that would be helped by the higher level of safety.

Level of comprehensiveness of the program: the projects in your program are not just about water safety but also could touch upon other societal needs and other actors. Hence, it is important to choose the ambition level of comprehensiveness of the program. It could be defined as not integral, rather integral or very integral for example.

Actors: In designing the program, you can state your ambition regarding participation. Depending also on your national planning doctrine or culture the actor’s confrontation could be described for example: consulted beforehand to give their consent, given the opportunity to comment on the project proposals or treated as co-creators of the projects even if this would lead to delays.

Feedback: periodically, all the projects must provide information to the program directorate to make it work. In designing the program architecture, you have to decide on what parameters you find it necessary that the feedback given. It could be based on project progress, financial depletion, and goal achievement.

Capacity building: Projects can only reach excellence when the most important disciplines – engineers, scientists and designers – are working together closely produce a synergy in the built results. Disciplines sometimes have their own language, are bound to their own silo or are otherwise unable to look beyond the scope of their profession. Capacity building to work together is therefore part of the program architecture. Some way of capacity building are workshops, summer school or on the spot learning modules.