What is the Project Governance?

Project governance is defined as an organization’s overall process for sharing decision rights about project management and monitoring the performance of project interventions.

Development organizations have some form of project governance, but those who have effective governance have a set of project governance mechanisms (committees, budgeting processes, approvals, etc.) that encourage a consistent behavior aligned with the organization's mission, strategy, values, norms, and culture.

The objective of project governance is to establish clear levels of authority and decision-making. It involves the people, policies and processes that provide the framework within which project managers make decisions and take actions to optimize outcomes related to their areas of responsibility. This is achieved by defining and identifying the roles, responsibilities and accountability of all people involved in a project, including their interaction and level of coordination around internal and external dependencies.

The organization’s management team is responsible for setting up and supporting the governance structure before the project initiates its activities to ensure that all key decisions are made at the right time. The management team defines the project governance in a document that defines the roles and responsibilities for decision-making in the project team; this may include the creation of a project committee and its high level operating rules.

A good project governance documents defines the procedures to follow for the escalation of issues, defines the decision-making structure, assigns roles and responsibilities of each of the different processes in the project from communications to budget change authorizations.?

Some development organizations may choose to have a standing project governance committee that oversees all projects and defines the decision-making structure for each project. In this case, the committee may include decisions about project proposal approvals and supervision of the organizations’ project portfolio in general, including the selection or appointment of project managers.

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