Digital Project Governance Boards

• Keeping board numbers low can be challenging with large, complex stakeholder groups with vested interests in the outcomes.
• Governance is sometimes conflated with communication and stakeholder engagement.

• Maintain a manageable board size (for example, eight members) and bring in external parties as required ⁽²³⁾.
• Establish separate mechanisms and forums for this purpose, so that the governance board can focus on its primary purpose of decision-making ⁽¹⁹⁾.
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities and formalise in project artefacts.
• Establish an inter-agency forum to assist with inter-agency collaboration and stakeholder cohesion.

• Too many layers and governance forums can dilute the project board's accountability, obfuscate escalation pathways, and slow down decision-making.
• Governance has remained static and hasn't evolved to the project's changing maturity or life cycle stage.

• Redesign the governance structures to minimise the number of levels while maintaining appropriate separation for effective and minimum viable governance ⁽⁴⁷⁾. Ensure each forum has a distinct role with clear roles and responsibilities.

• As part of onboarding, proactively communicate expected time commitments and meeting cadence. Integrate this into board members' formal role descriptions and ToR ⁽⁴⁵⁾.
• Utilise targeted board workplans and agendas to sharpen board meetings to focus on decision points versus information sharing.
• Revise project structures to consolidate into a smaller number of committees and boards if SRO and members have a number of boards within the same portfolio.

• Utilise targeted coaching, mentoring and training to foster and build foundational SRO competencies ⁽⁴⁸⁾.
• Consider establishing an independent advisor or assurance (the DTA's portfolio assurance team can advise you on this).
• "Two in a box ^(32,33)". See role of the CIO

• Apply Skills Matrix to guide appointments.
• Ensure balance of technical, delivery, implementation and governance skills.
• Appoint independent members who can provide neutral advice, ask critical questions, and contribute to the board's effectiveness.
• Onboarding process. See above.
• Cross-pollination – peer SROs attending each other's board meetings ^[1-SRO].

• Targeted agile training and education with a focus on core principles, iterative nature, and differences to waterfall methodology.
• Integrate agile principles into the operation of the board (increased cadence of shorter meetings, use of simple visual tools for board tasks/decisions, retrospectives etc.).
• Consider the value of Agile certification for board members.
• Appointment of Board members with Agile delivery experience.
• Inclusion of agile delivery experience in board skills matrix.

• Substantive reliance or over reliance on third parties.
• Vendors or Project Manager filling the vacuum of organisation capability.

• Clearly define the third party or vendor's role (for example, as non-voting members or SMEs).
• Involve vendors in specific technical or delivery sub-groups, reporting to the board.
• Scale vendor or third party involvement in line with project lifecycle and critical phases.
• Limit vendor inclusion to agenda items aligned with their scope of work.

• Board members consistently delegating attendance.
• Not reading papers or just showing up between other commitments ⁽²³⁾.
• Distracted in meetings.
• Lack of understanding of roles.

• Report meeting attendance (similar to corporate board reporting).
• Establish formal protocols to minimise use of proxies or delegates (for example, require chair or secretariat approval for a proxy for members, CEO review and approval for chair) ^(11,28).
• Clarify ToR and documented roles and responsibilities.

• Members driving a particular agenda: Seeking to influence board decision-making or focus, to pursue a particular matter of personal or functional importance at the expense of what is best for the project or organisation ⁽²⁸⁾.
• Inability to get a balanced input from all members ⁽¹⁹⁾.

• Clear articulation of business outcomes and values. Explicit and regular re-examination of operational deliverables and performance measures defined in the business case and detailed scoping documentation ⁽²³⁾.

• Adversarial behaviour, "hand grenades," fractured and dysfunctional relationships ⁽¹⁹⁾, an environment that is not psychologically safe ⁽²³⁾ or is used as an opportunity for blame smearing ⁽²⁸⁾.
• Conflicts are avoided and not addressed ⁽²³⁾.

• Build a culture of openness. Articulate conflicts with an aim of producing a stable and workable compromise ⁽²³⁾.

• Lag between report content and meeting ⁽²³⁾.
• "Watermelon" reporting - green one month, red the next.
• Packs too long, too short, or not representing information in a way that is useful for board decision-making.

• Establish and communicate Project Board Work Plan.
• Leverage or reuse baseline reporting standards and templates.
• Focus on decision-making not information dissemination ⁽¹⁹⁾, emphasising risks, issues, exceptions, escalated matters.
• Communicate the board's reporting needs to the project manager. Take an active, not a passive, approach to sourcing required information ⁽²³⁾.

Areas to address:

• Agendas are risk and decision-focused
• Maintaining group decision and action registers
• Focus on what is left to do what has not been done

• Establish performance metrics to enable measurement of expected savings or benefits ⁽⁴⁹⁾.
• One model that can be used is the five-case business model ⁽⁵⁰⁾, a structured approach for developing and evaluating business cases on five dimensions: Strategic, Economic, Commercial, Financial and Management.
• Ensure project benefits are adequately documented and discussed during planning stages.
• Regularly revisit original benefits vs actual benefits through the Project Board work plan, against project lifecycle.

• Establish structures around the project to maximise the chance of delivery of these benefits ⁽⁵⁰⁾.
• Ensure the benefits plans articulate when the benefits are likely to be realised, and ensure there are mechanisms (and resources) to continue to monitor and maximise benefits until that time ⁽⁵⁰⁾.
• "Gold standard" is to have an independent evaluation comparing what was promised against what was delivered ⁽⁵⁰⁾.

• Regular reporting on project progress, requirements and benefits.
• Independent Board Member or Critical Friend.
• Integrate demonstrations of product across work plan to validate reported project progress.

Continually question:

• Are we aligned on the vision?
• Who is owning the benefit realisation?
• Are we getting good value for this investment?
• With all change requests: What are the implications for benefits and impact?
• Are we minimising negative impact on our users?
• Is the case for change still feasible and achievable?

Flawed foundations can include:

• The project is based on implementing a particular solution, rather than solving a particular problem, and hasn't properly assessed alternative options ⁽⁵⁰⁾.
• The project was under-estimated, for example, didn't account for whole-of-life costing, or did not adequately consider the impact of decommissioning activities ⁽⁴⁹⁾.

• Request an independent assurance review to assess foundational issues and risks. Request recommendations for corrective action.
• Revisit and revise the business case with a view to adjusting to reflect actualities.
• Temporarily pause the project whilst engaging with delivery partners, users etc. to reconfirm the problem to be solved.

Decision-making is:

• poorly informed
• not timely
• doesn't consider impact on benefits
• re-prosecuted

• Ensure board members have appropriate delegation to make decisions.
• Articulate the project "burn rate" (cost per day) to understand impact of slow decision-making.
• Ensure change request forms articulate impact on benefits.
• Revisit cadence and duration of Project Board meetings.
• Ensure those with a contributing interest are in the room but avoid placing stakeholders on the board if their role is more appropriately handled separately ⁽²⁸⁾.
• Schedule time to engage board directly with the project (for example, attending project meetings) to build deeper understanding of risks and issues ⁽²³⁾.

• Core decisions made outside governance forums.
• Board meetings are seen as ceremonial, not challenging assumptions ⁽²³⁾.

• Clarify and reiterate escalation processes.
• Ensure that the project governance aligns and can co-exist with other organisational or financial governance processes ⁽²⁸⁾.
• Formalise delegation between the project, board and broader organisational governance.