Project Governance

Well intentioned and well planned projects continuously get stuck in a quagmire of intangible mud that holds the project’s progress in abeyance until necessary decisions and oversight is applied to free them.  Recent doctoral research of the author has shown that there are necessary conditions and critical success factors for project success and an outlier of this research was the attribute of project governance. Upon further reflection, it became the case of the glaring obvious, as projects were getting stuck because they did not have the decision making structures in place to provide timely decisions. So spawns the genesis of this blog in a reflection of project governance and its importance to project success. This phenomenon was discovered when researching public sector projects.

While one can argue that you need to match the sophistication of your project tools with the complexity of the project given the maturity of the environment in which they are conducted, so too can be said for the need for appropriate governance structures. Governance of projects addresses the need for structures to control and facilitate progress of projects by those in positions of oversight. Quite simply, we need to decide who gets to decide.

All too often we delay this determination until an important project decision needs to be made.  We then turn to our only governance structure available which resides in the permanent organization that may not be sufficiently nimble to address the needs of the temporary organization which is our project.  All too often other issues of the day take precedence and the project is left without direction.

My experience suggests project managers and or project sponsors need to consider project governance and its structure early in the project life cycle.  A best practice is to determine the nature and structure of your project governance before decisions are needed.

 

Dr. Dale Christenson, DPM, PMP, CMC