Project governance vs project management

For years I thought "project governance" was a meaningless phrase, basically "project management" but with higher-ranked people. It turns out there is a difference.

• Project management is about getting the project to do certain things.
• Project governance is about stakeholders getting assurance that the things will happen.

The importance of project governance

The separation is important because project governance has a different set of methods, and those methods are more general. You can have 20 or 100 different projects which you govern in the same way. But if you manage 20 or 100 different projects in the same way then you're probably gonna have a bad time.

To make this more concrete, an example of bad project management would be when the project manager does not have a list of tasks that need to be completed. Whereas bad project governance would be when the sponsor has not asked whether there is a list of tasks that need to be completed. Or, the sponsor has not validated those assertions in accordance with their risk appetite. (Or has not even determined their risk appetite!)

Project governance vs team autonomy

Project governance is particularly relevant in an "agile" context because it is common to have a series of sprints and not have a clear idea of how many more sprints are left. Project governance is essential in (a) deciding whether the organisation is OK with this and (b) putting guardrails around the project to remediate the situation (if necessary) without compromising autonomy.

There are some sources which say project governance provides a "template" or "recipe" for project management. This is true but needs to be taken with care. Project governance imposes requirements that project management must comply with. However, if project governance is mandating the methods by which the project is managed, in any level of detail, then perhaps there is a problem.

This situation might be appropriate where an organisation is trying to improve on poor project management practices. But longer-term we want project governance to focus on outcomes, and let project managers manage the best way they know how. Otherwise project managers are just overpaid clerks, and project sponsors become part-time puppetmasters operating on incomplete information.

Another anti-pattern in project governance is to add people. It is generally understood that adding workers to the project team does not necessarily translate to increased output, but it is often believed that adding an additional manager or quasi-manager such as a "delivery lead" is a positive step for a troubled project. The reality is that sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, and ideally your project governance processes would guide you as to which situations call for which interventions. Again the distinction has to be made between adding a person to aid project management, versus adding a person to collect information for project governance purposes.

Finally, it should be noted that in smaller organisations the project management and project governance roles may be performed by the same person. Even so, they should keep the two roles separate. The person should "wear two hats" rather than folding project governance into project management.

In any case, project governance should always try to be positive: rather than just shutting down non-compliant projects or collecting completed status report forms, we want to encourage and facilitate projects to achieve their goals in the right way, share best practices across projects, and generally help make the overall organisation simpler and easier to run.

#project #projectmanagement #governance #projectgovernance #agile