Project Governance: A Matter of Strategy or a Routine Activity?

Jiwat is a seasoned professional with proven skills and varied academic- and industry-based background in project management. Jiwat brings in contemporary skills and knowledge of current trends in PM.

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Topics: Governance, Organizational Project Management, Risk Management, Stakeholder Management, Strategy

Thanks to Prof. Ding Ronggui for his input on this article.

Project governance is a mechanism to set objectives, exercise control and establish a framework for decision making, authority and compliance. The fact that projects are temporary structures raises the question of whether governance in projects is a matter of strategy or just an operational routine activity.

More recently, project governance has been described using the umbrella term “enterprise management” and linked to “3PM”: portfolio, program and project management (Too and Weaver, 2014). From a 3PM conceptual lens, project governance is first about the selection and prioritization of projects that are aligned to the long-term objectives and strategy of the organization; and then actively monitoring whether the organization is achieving the set objectives (hence, effectively performing the project governance).

To different managers, the scope of project governance varies depending on their authority scopes; to a top manager, project governance is more about management of all the projects by taking an approach such as 3PM; to a project manager, project governance is more about the operational management of a project.

However, as important as it may sound, not many organizations have the required …

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