Making Governance Your Friend

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   New Practitioners   Organizational Project Management   Risk Management  

I’m not sure that any project manager will tell you that they love organizational governance functions. Whether it’s process governance applied by the PMO, or a project steering committee aimed at ensuring the project is delivering what’s needed, there is always a sense of someone checking up on the project manager and potentially questioning their decisions.

For new project managers, that can sometimes be worse than for those with more experience. Their projects tend to be less significant for the organization, and they may not have a formal management steering or oversight committee. That may mean that there’s less formal governance, especially as things like process audits are becoming less common (a topic for another day), and instead there is simple second-guessing from sponsors and customers.

If you’re a new PM struggling to figure out how to succeed and you find your actions are being questioned, it’s easy to become disheartened. But you shouldn’t be—governance can be your friend!

Why do we have governance?
Let’s take a step back for a minute and consider why governance exists at all. It’s not because people aren’t trusted, it’s because having more than one person monitoring performance makes it more likely that any problems or errors will be spotted sooner. And the quicker we find a …

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