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If you find yourself following mandatory reporting or assurance procedures which seem to be completely disconnected from the needs of the project or even to run counter to those needs.
If nobody is clear who is supposed to be making a decision or indeed on what basis some (or many) of the people involved in decision-making have for being there.
If decisions take forever or it’s impossible to find out on what basis they’ve actually been made …
There are plenty of indicators that your project governance isn’t doing what it needs to do, even if we ignore the legion of stories of projects that were derailed for reasons that, with hindsight, look as if they should have been anticipated.
The recent Association roundtable, run in conjunction with the APM Governance SiG, addressed this very question amongst this issues we explored was:
Governance that is simply unsuited for the job
Governance can often be copied across wholesale from a previous project or even imported from another corporate model – for example by using the Companies Act to set the organization up as a company. Whilst these approaches have the benefit of speed, that is about all they do have. The governance structure of the Companies Act establishes roles such as Chairman, CEO and Independent Executive Directors; all fine if you are setting up a business but confusing and ill-matched for a project.
And, as far as adopting a ‘ready-to-use’ approach goes, the feedback from one of the delegates in the roundtable neatly illustrates the shortcomings:
“Governance isn’t aligned with delivery models across dimensions of systems (processes), strucures (authorities and accountabilities) and culture (leadership and behaviours)”
Governance needs to be tailored to reflect the nature of the project, the chosen delivery model and the make-up of the project organization. There’s nothing counter-intuitive here. If you are defining how people on the project will work together and how they will behave, then you clearly need to reflect the reality of who they are.
Governance that is inflexible and unable to adapt
Complex projects remain processes of discovery. Being clear of the outcome you wish to achieve is clearly important but that doesn’t mean you can begin to understand exactly how you will get from A to B or can anticipate how the process of change within the project or from the external environment will shape how you subsequently work. In today’s environment, predicting what will happen in six months is a challenge, let alone ten years.
So, far from being a rigid set of rules, you need a governance structure and approach that is not only designed for change but includes times and triggers to provide the space for that to happen.
A project workforce that don’t understand the meaning of governance
In this context, governance is very similar to strategy. Employees within the organisation know there is something there without understanding exactly what it’s for or what it’s meant to do or, alternatively, they know they have a procedure they must follow but because they don’t understand the procedure, they simply follow it by rote. Clearly, the bigger and more complex the structure, the harder it is going to be for everyone to get their head around it. This is exacerbated by the use of language that is often arcane or technical and rarely describes what someone actually does or why.
Governance that fails to protect the value of the project or the benefits that need to be realised
Governance, as with so much of the project management processes, often seems to focus on the asset delivery and ignores what happens after that, which is when the value of the investment is realised (or not).
What’s the solution?
There are no silver bullets when it comes to solving these and other governance issues but there are some useful pointers:
- Make the process of governance and decision-making as transparent as possible;
- Think through your governance process from first principles and avoid bolting on a pre-defined system;
- Be ready to challenge the process and the structure if it isn’t working;
- Make your governance a living system: use it, work with it not round it;
- Specify the key roles, responsibilities and accountabilities: explain who is responsible for what and why, and be precise;
- Think about what key stakeholders (particularly political stakeholders) will need in the way of fireworks to be able to showcase progress so you can avoid the schedule for key stage gates or final delivery being hijacked
Read: A Comparative Analysis of Project Delivery Approaches
Browse resources from our knowledge repository on Governance