The governance of projects is not intuitive.

Every major IT disaster in the past 15 years has been presided over by an executive Sponsor and Steering Committee. While competent in their ‘day jobs’, these executives did not know how to steer or govern their project to success.

Governance of projects requires a level of knowledge and understanding that is different to that of a line or project manager.

Every study of project success and failure finds that “senior management support” is a critical success factor - usually one of the top three criteria. But what does this mean?

Our research has found that effective project governance can significantly increase the likelihood and value of benefits realized. However, we also found that most (over 90%) of executives were neither trained nor wholly confident in project governance roles.

To address this deficiency we developed our Complete Business Project Governance Framework.

It is designed from a business strategy point of view (rather than, say, an IT-project delivery viewpoint). This ensures that the focus of the governance team is always on achieving the business outcomes and benefits (and not getting absorbed into the details of the project).

Importantly, it is designed to maximize the value of each project to the business. This is achieved through the use of ‘level-four project delivery maturity’ models1 and frameworks to ensure the governance team are aware of what can cause their projects to succeed or fail.

For example, we cover the two types of scope, how scope-changes need to be managed against the project’s value proposition and how progressive scope creep can be a leading indicator of failure. Most approaches to project governance only address scope management.

Some of our project delivery concepts are new while others are just further developed than those found in conventional approaches. The overriding principle, however, is to increase the value delivered from each and every project/program.

Users of the Framework have found it ‘essential’ and ‘key to avoiding the problems we’ve experienced before’.

Most people’s view of Project Governance is very narrow and limited. The following diagram shows the principal dimensions of Business Project Governance overall.

Beingaprojectsponsor.com focuses on the “GOVERN PROJECTS” activities.

For details of this business maturity model, see “Project Delivery Capability - The next competitive battleground” at www.capability.com.au

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