Project Governance

Project Governance can be seen as consisting of nine key roles:

1. Establish the basis for project governance, approval and measurement —including defining roles and accountabilities, policies and standards and associated processes.

2. Evaluate project proposals to select those that are the best investment of funds and scarce resources and are within the firm’s capability and capacity to deliver.

3. Enable, through resourcing of projects with staff and consultants, harnessing and managing of business support and the provision of the governance resources.

4. Define the ‘desired business outcomes’ (end states), benefits and value — the business measures of success and overall value proposition.

5. Control the scope, contingency funds, overall project value and so on.

6. Monitor the project’s progress, stakeholder’s commitment, results achieved and the leading indicators of failure.

7. Measure the outputs, outcomes, benefits and value — against both the plan and measurable expectations.

8. Act to ‘steer’ the project into the organization, remove obstacles, manage the critical success factors and remediate project or benefit-realization shortfalls.

9. Develop the organization’s project delivery capability — continually building and enhancing its ability to deliver more complex and challenging projects in less time and for less cost while generating the maximum value.