What is Component Projects?
Components are the projects, subsidiary programs, and other work inside a program. Each has its own manager, plan, and deliverables; the program layer manages what none of them can see alone — cross-component dependencies, shared resources, integrated risk, and the combined benefits case.
Program-level decisions about components are structural: initiate, accelerate, pause, re-scope, or close them as benefits logic dictates. The program manager doesn't re-manage the component's tasks; she manages the component's place in the whole.
Worked example
In a rail-electrification program, components include substations construction, overhead-line installation, rolling-stock procurement, and signaling upgrades. The overhead-line project is healthy in isolation — but the program layer sees rolling stock arriving eight months before the lines it needs, and re-sequences both. That intersection is exactly where programs earn their keep.