Rethinking Project Governance for Current Times

  Governance  

Ask a project sponsor what governance means, and you may hear about stage gates, committees, authority limits, and regular reports. This is project governance as it was originally conceived in the 20^th century, but projects these days are not quite the same. Our review of 636 studies published in the last 20 years or so suggests the field has travelled a long way from there (Bakhshi, Matous and Crawford, 2026).

Where the traditional view came from

Early governance research borrowed two ideas from economics. The first is that the party paying for some work and the party doing it want different things, and the payer cannot see everything the worker does. The practical response is to specify requirements tightly, tie payment to verifiable milestones, and monitor. Most delegation-of-authority frameworks and reporting regimes trace back to this logic.

The second idea is that writing, monitoring, and enforcing agreements is itself costly, which makes the choice of what to keep in-house and what to contract out a governance question rather than only a procurement one.

Both ideas still hold in a way, especially where scope is relatively stable, and compliance stakes are high. Their limitation is that they assume the outcome can be specified up front. Where different requirements emerge as the project proceeds, which is inevitable (for example, for projects in innovation …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.