6 Steering Committee Questions to Retire...and 6 to Replace Them

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

  Governance   Portfolio Management   Risk Management   Strategy  

Do this arithmetic with me. It takes 10 seconds and it will ruin your next steering committee.

Bent Flyvbjerg’s Oxford database holds more than 16,000 large projects—the biggest of its kind anywhere. Three numbers come out of it:

• 47.9% of those projects came in on budget.
• 8.5% came in on budget and on time.
• 0.5% came in on budget, on time and delivered the benefits they were promised.

Now divide. Among the projects that hit the two targets we celebrate—the ones that get the congratulatory email, the ones that go on the slide—fewer than one in 15 actually delivered the value they were funded to create.

Sit with that. Not the failures. The successes.

We have built a profession, a certification industry and several billion dollars of software around a definition of success that is very nearly uncorrelated with the reason the money was spent. And the reason it survives is embarrassingly simple.

Nobody ever got fired for being on track.

Green is safe. Green is defensible. Green is a question you can answer with a system export at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. Value is a question that takes 18 months to answer, by which time the project manager has moved on, the sponsor has been promoted, and the file is closed.

So we ask the safe question, forever, and we call it governance.

What follows are six questions I would like you to retire…

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