Setting Up Your First Program

A program in Cursus represents a single change initiative — an ERP rollout, a restructuring, a new operating model, or any other discrete change. This guide walks through creating one from scratch.

Step 1: NLP program intake

Navigate to Programs → New Program. Instead of filling out a form, describe the change in plain language:

"We're migrating Finance and Operations from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. Go-live is Q3. The transition will affect approximately 400 people across AP, AR, FP&A, and Procurement."

Lumen reads this description and:

• Extracts the program name, type, and target go-live
• Suggests impacted stakeholder groups based on the departments you mentioned
• Pre-populates the program structure with recommended phases
• Tags the program with likely impact dimensions (process, technology, role)

Review Lumen's interpretation and confirm or edit before the program is saved. Lumen's suggestions appear with a teal background — nothing is applied without your confirmation.

Step 2: Link stakeholder groups

Stakeholder groups are defined at the organization level (not per-program), so they carry continuous change load history across all initiatives. On the Stakeholders tab:

• Add the groups Lumen suggested, or search for others
• Set each group's involvement type: Directly impacted, Indirectly affected, or Sponsor/champion
• Assign a primary practitioner responsible for each group

Groups with fewer than 5 members will show "Insufficient data" in readiness views due to aggregation thresholds.

Step 3: Create releases and milestones

Go to the Releases tab to define the program timeline:

• Releases are the major delivery gates (e.g., UAT, pilot go-live, full rollout)
• Milestones are key readiness checkpoints within a release (e.g., training complete, comms sent)

Releases drive the temporal layer in E-C Matrix views — you can scrub through time to see how readiness evolves against the delivery schedule.

Step 4: Add change impacts

Change impacts are the specific ways work will change for each group. Go to Impacts and add entries manually, or ask Lumen to generate a first draft based on the program description.

Each impact has:

• Dimension — Role, process, technology, or organizational
• Impacted group — Which stakeholder group is affected
• Severity — Low / medium / high / critical
• Description — What specifically is changing

Impacts feed the change load calculation and the traceability matrix. More complete impact data means more accurate readiness scoring.