Is Your Project Governance Suffering From A One Size Fits All Approach?

We know that “one size fits all” doesn’t work for t-shirts, or shoes. So why do we think it will work for project governance?

Many people will feel logically aligned to the opening sentence, and yet still do one-size-fits-all governance.

If

• every time you have a project over $X or X duration, you set up a governance committee
• or, if your governance committees for all your projects meet at the same frequency (e.g. monthly)
• of, if the expectations of your governance committees are set by an enterprise-wide governance charter
• or, if governance attendees are always the people who can action things to make your project progress smoother
• or, if there’s an enterprise standard ‘deck’ for writing governance packs

…you could be guilty of having a one-size-fits-all governance approach.

Some projects don’t need governance

I have seen projects with budgets over $10m that did not need governance.

They were self-contained, with dedicated resources that were not in contention for other projects, with no dependencies outside the project, not influenced by events happening outside the project.

There was no value in a group of highly-paid, time-poor executives to meet once a month and pour over a report that took a team of people days to write. It didn’t achieve anything.

It pays to think about why your project needs governance.

Some projects need different things from governance than other projects

Governance can be useful for many reasons. Each of these reasons may create a need for a different “flavour” of governance.

• Resources that are in contention are needed by the project. Governance can champion your cause, align resources, make contention decisions.
• Events outside of your project can influence your project. Governance members can have context outside of your project that you as the Project Manager are not privy to. Governance can balance organisational competing needs and make the right calls for your project that you could never make without the wider context governance members bring.
• Other parts of the organisation are dependent on your project outcomes. A slip in your project creates resource alignment decisions in another project. Governance helps with the alignment beyond what the project team can see.

Governance isn’t about keeping you on-track and on-budget

On-track and on-budget can be communicated with a set of data, a PMO dashboard, or a report. It doesn’t need 6 or 10, or 15 highly-paid time-poor people to gather in a room once a month for an hour or two.

What value is governance bringing to your project?

What value is governance of your project bringing to the organisation?

And have you set up your governance structure, attendees, rituals and reports to make maximum use of that value?

Some of you will disagree with this view because it goes contra- to what is normal. I like to challenge people to think differently. Different thinking creates progress.