You Really Should Like Governance

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Governance  

What do you think of if I start talking about governance? Your mind probably goes to some kind of restrictions or controls on what you are able to do. Maybe a PMO or similar function trying to interfere with the way that you are managing a project. Or maybe a lot of forms to fill out and reports to run that don’t seem to have a lot of purpose to them. Those would be fairly common reactions to something that has never been popular.

But I’d like to change that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you that some of those traditional approaches to governance are actually wonderful and that PMs should be more accepting of every aspect of them. I know that a lot of traditional governance models are too heavy handed, too manual, require too much time and effort, and don’t actually do much to safeguard the project, its people or the organization as a whole.

But that doesn’t mean that governance isn’t important, that project managers shouldn’t embrace the idea of it, or celebrate when it is done right.

Understanding governance

A friend of mine compares governance to the brakes on a car. He suggests that good governance allows a project to move faster because it provides a means to control that velocity. That analogy is reinforced when you consider that the strongest, most powerful brakes are generally fitted to the most …

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