How to govern your project to ensure success
Governance may sound too bureaucratic to set up for a system deployment project. It triggers negative associations with rigid hierarchical structures that are slow and complex. On the other hand, without governance, you have no guidelines to run your project. It provides a framework for issue resolution in a timely manner. In fact, the larger your project, the more you need a clear governance process upfront. The question is then how do we set up a governance process that provides clear guidelines without slowing the project down.
Governance starts with setting the rules of engagement during the project. Without rules, there is no governance. These rules of engagement can be summarized under four key areas, namely compliance, steering, controlling, and escalation. Let’s go through each one by one.
Compliance is the process of making sure your project team members are following the standards. It is about making sure your project methodology is being followed and all members are doing their best to stay compliant with the standards. These standards can be both functional and technical such as documentation, specifications, testing, code promotion, etc. Compliance is a measurement of the gap between what you were intending to do versus what you are actually doing. Thus, you need to set these standards upfront and establish a monitoring mechanism that they are followed.
Steering is the process of guiding the project towards its objectives. As we face compliance issues or unforeseen events such as project team member turnover, a business disruption due to weather, etc.; the project must be actively steered to manage around these issues. Daily meetings, weekly updates (please refer to this blog), etc. are all parts of this active steering process. You may need to pivot in key moments to stay on track. Thus, you need to set these steering events upfront to actively steer your project.
Controlling is the process of minimizing the negative effects of external factors on the project. Projects do not exist in a vacuum. They depend on several external factors ranging from getting trading partners (customer, vendor, franchise, etc.), government or bank approvals to changing business environment (acquisitions, new product lines, external system changes, etc.). Thus, you need to identify and monitor these external factors constantly.
Escalation is the process of raising an issue thus facilitating its resolution within an organization. When you have a significant non-compliance that you cannot steer through or an external factor that you cannot control, you need to escalate the problem to higher levels in the organization. Escalation needs to be done through multiple layers. You cannot escalate every issue to the executives immediately. The project team needs to escalate it to the project managers. Project managers need to escalate it to the steering committee. Each escalation must have clear rules. Thus, you need to set up escalation paths upfront and schedule regular steering committee meetings to remove roadblocks.
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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.
