This article seeks to identify the nature and key facets of programmes and programme working and to create a coherent framework for understanding and exploiting the capacities programmes have to organise project-based activity. Based on consulting interventions and action research, the article argues that programme management has evolved a core set of actions, structural arrangements and approaches, which, when compared with project management, are distinct and address conceptually different issues. The article advocates the recognition of programme management as a distinct, albeit emerging, discipline and greater inquiry into the techniques which underpin its effective application, rather than the imposition of sometimes inappropriate project level concepts and practices.