Bodies Project governance
Project governance is the mechanism that answers four questions: who decides, on what, at what pace, and on what information. Three of them are widely documented. The fourth, the information the decision relies on, is almost always dealt with last, and it is what decides the value of the other three.
Project governance, n.
Three clarifications are worth making from the start, because they avoid the three most frequent misunderstandings.
Governance is not project management. Managing is organizing production. Governing is deciding what production cannot settle on its own: a scope decision, a milestone postponement, an acceptance of risk.
It is not proportional to the size of the project. A three-month project with two people has a governance, even an informal one. The question is not whether one is needed, but whether the one that exists is explicit.
It does not stop at your organization. On a contracted project, half of the decisions depend on the client. A governance that describes only one side of the link describes half the mechanism.
Bodies: who meets, and to decide what.
Five bodies keep coming back, under varying names. What sets them apart is not frequency, it is what they are entitled to decide.
| Body | Usual cadence | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Steering committee | Monthly | Scope, deadline, budget, acceptance of major risks. |
| Project committee | Weekly or every two weeks | Nothing contractual. It prepares, it alerts, it clears blockers. |
| Internal project review | Monthly | The health of the project on the supplier side: margin, workload, team. The client is not there. |
| Account review | Quarterly | The relationship as a whole, beyond a single project. Often led by sales. |
| Escalation committee | On demand | What the steering committee could not decide, at a higher level of the hierarchy. |
The most common mistake is to merge the first two. A steering committee that spends its hour on operational follow-up no longer decides: it notes. The detail of this body is on steering committee software.
Roles: who carries what, on both sides.
A role is not a title. It is a named responsibility on a precise decision, and it exists on both sides of the contractual link.
The sponsor
They carry the stakes and decide in the last resort. Without an identified sponsor on the client side, no structuring decision is made in session.
The project director
They hold the overall commitment: scope, deadline, budget. They answer for the variance, not the team.
The project manager
They hold production and the workload plan. They alert, they do not decide alone on what commits the contract.
The follow-up lead
They hold the data: progress, actions, risks, minutes. The role most often implicit, and the first to disappear under load.
Sales
They carry the relationship and the amendments. Keeping them out of operational follow-up guarantees they will discover the drift too late.
The same, on the client side
Sponsor, business lead, approver. A responsibility matrix that stops at your door leaves half of the decisions without an owner.
This is the purpose of a responsibility matrix, whose structuring rule is that an activity never has more than one approver.
Artifacts: what the bodies produce.
They are what remains when the meeting is over, and they alone can be relied on in six months.
The agenda
Circulated beforehand, it conditions everything else: a committee where topics are discovered in session cannot decide anything that day.
The minutes
They record the decisions, the pending decisions and the actions. Their value depends entirely on one thing: who approves them.
The decision and action log
Each action carries an owner, a due date and a requester. It is the requester who closes it, never the assignee alone.
The risk register
It has value only when dated: what matters is not that a risk is known, but that you can establish since when it was.
Why governance holds poorly in mid-sized organizations.
It is not a question of competence, nor of will. It is a question of support. In an organization with no projects department, the mechanism rests on the rigor of one person: the one who prepares the committees, keeps the action table, chases the approvals.
As long as they are there, governance holds and seems natural. When they leave, on leave or for good, the mechanism leaves with them, because it existed nowhere other than in their practice. It is then rebuilt from scratch, with another spreadsheet and other conventions.
Steering maturity can, moreover, be measured, and the gap it opens is documented: at PMI, organizations that invest in proven steering practices waste up to 28× less than the others. A governance that is actually maintained is not an extra of form, it is what separates the two groups.
SOURCE PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2017.
In other words: a governance that holds only through one person's will is not a governance, it is a habit. The difference shows the day that person is no longer there.
Governance and operational commitment management.
Project governance describes the bodies: who decides, at what pace, on what agenda. Operational commitment management describes what these bodies hold: what was promised, by whom, by what date, and on what dated proof. One is the frame. The other is the substance.
That is why a governance mechanism that is impeccable on paper can prevent nothing. The bodies exist, the roles are named, the meetings are held, and the gap is nonetheless discovered at invoicing, because the information on which the bodies would decide was rebuilt at each session.
Equipping governance is therefore not formalizing more. It is making sure the substance exists continuously, and that both parties read it. This is what we call operational commitment management.
What changes when governance is equipped.
Three effects, and none requires creating a dedicated function.
Committees are prepared from live data
The deck is aggregated from the current progress, finance and risks. The evening before the session disappears, and the body decides on the project rather than on a frozen copy of it.
Minutes are approved by the client
Submitted, approved or rejected with a reason, then frozen. A silence remains a silence, but it is dated.
The mechanism outlives the people
Roles, cadences and artifacts live in the tool. A departure no longer calls governance itself into question.
Large organizations have a commitments department: a function, people, rituals dedicated to holding what was promised. The others do not have that budget. The complete tour is on the product page, and the contractual frame on the commitment levels.
What we are asked about governance.
What is project governance?
The mechanism that answers four questions about a project: who decides, on what, at what pace, and on what information. It is made up of bodies, roles and artifacts. It describes the frame of the decision, not the substance it concerns.
What is the difference between governance and project management?
Managing is organizing production: tasks, assignments, progress. Governing is deciding what production cannot settle on its own, and answering for it. The two overlap little and do not replace each other.
Which bodies should be set up on a mid-sized project?
Two are most often enough: a weekly or biweekly project committee that prepares and alerts, and a monthly steering committee that decides. The internal review is added on the supplier side. Beyond that, you create meetings more than you create decisions.
How often should a steering committee meet?
Monthly in most cases. More often, it encroaches on the operational and stops deciding; more spaced out, the variances it discovers are no longer correctable. What matters more than frequency is that nothing is discovered there.
Can governance exist without a formal contract?
Yes, and it is common internally. An IT department facing its business lines holds due dates, without penalty and without a contract. The mechanism is the same: bodies, roles, artifacts, and shared information.
How do you equip governance without creating a dedicated department?
By having the tool carry the mechanism rather than a function: cadences, roles and artifacts live in it, and the substance holds itself. That is what lets an organization of thirty people hold what large ones hold with a team.
Going further.
- The steering committee: preparing and holding the body that decides.
- Committee minutes: the structure that holds, and who approves it.
- Operational commitment management: the substance the bodies hold.
- The product tour: committees, action logs, history.