Project Manager | Driving Clean Energy Innovations for a Sustainable Future| Canadian Nuclear Laboratories Ontario, Canada
Many organizations keep adding governance layers — more templates, more approvals, more committees. Yet delivery capability isn’t improving at the same pace.
Teams spend more time reporting than removing blockers, and more time following process than adapting to change.
So here’s the question:
Has governance maturity started to outgrow actual delivery capability?
If yes, what should we trim, keep, or redesign to make governance support delivery instead of slowing it down?
I think governance has a real risk of becoming an end in itself. Good governance should create clarity, remove risk, and help teams make faster decisions—not add layers of approvals and reporting. The best approach is to trim low-value reporting, keep controls that protect quality and compliance, and redesign processes around actual delivery outcomes. A simple test: if a governance activity doesn’t help the team make a better decision, remove a blocker, or reduce meaningful risk, it’s probably worth challenging. Governance should enable delivery—not become another delivery bottleneck. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
A very relevant question. I would distinguish, however, between more governance and greater governance maturity. Additional templates, approvals, reporting and committees may increase governance complexity without necessarily improving governance quality.
The test may therefore be less about how much governance exists and more about what each mechanism actually enables or protects. Does it improve decision quality, reduce material risk, clarify authority and accountability, or provide information that someone can meaningfully act upon? If not, its value deserves to be questioned.
At the same time, slower delivery is not necessarily evidence of governance failure. Some controls legitimately constrain speed where safety, regulation, risk or irreversible consequences require greater scrutiny. The issue is whether that constraint is proportionate to what is at stake.
Perhaps the objective should therefore be neither to minimize governance nor to maximize delivery speed, but to design governance that is proportionate to risk and consequence, removes unnecessary friction, and preserves sufficient authority and discretion where the work is actually being performed.
In that sense, governance maturity may be demonstrated not by how much control an organization has accumulated, but by how deliberately it knows what to control, why, where, and to what degree. Saving Changes...
I think we need suitable Eng. governance and should have an eye on delivery as well. I am not calling that Over-Eng, although in some areas it may be a little bit off the route. Saving Changes...
This happens when different control partners continue to add requirements which get band-aid'ed on to existing procedures. A better approach is to understand the control objectives across all key control partners and then empower teams to figure out how to address those objectives in an appropriate manner for the context of their projects.
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Yes, I think this happens when governance keeps growing in response to every issue that appears. More approvals, reports, and templates are added, but rarely removed. I would keep the controls that help with decisions, risk, and accountability, and question anything that is mostly adding work without helping the project move. Saving Changes...
Adequate governance should establish clear processes and procedures that facilitate delivery, not that produces overwhelming or interruption of it. Delivery should determine order priorities and have perfect real-time management. Saving Changes...
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