Guidance for Senior Responsible Officials
Assurance Research Series 02
Appendix: Digital Project Governance Board Roles and Responsibilities
References: 10, 12, 15, 19, 21, 23, 28, 31, 51-53
| Role | Relationship to Board | Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| All members and chair | Comprise the Board |
|
Senior Responsible Official (SRO) Also known as:
To note:
| Chair of board | The Senior Responsible Official (SRO), is the official with ultimate accountability for a project meeting its objectives, delivering the projected outcomes and realising the required benefits within the policies set by Government. The SRO is the owner of the business case and accountable for all aspects of governance. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
|
Senior User Also known as:
| Member of board | A business owner/senior user must be identified for all projects, no matter the size or complexity. There may be one or more senior users or operations managers at varying managerial levels depending on the size of the project. These are typically senior operational or policy staff who will benefit, or whose stakeholders will benefit. The senior user is a core member of the governance board. Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
|
Independent Board Adviser To note:
| Member of board | An independent board adviser provides scrutiny and constructive challenge to help keep the SRO and board focussed on what must go right for the project to succeed. They are free from material conflicts of interest to ensure they can faithfully discharge their responsibilities. Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
|
| Assurance providers | Independent advice and assurance to Board | Providing impartial, expert advice and assurance to support informed decision-making and successful delivery of digital initiatives. To achieve this, assurance providers conduct objective assessments of project health, delivery confidence, and risk exposure. They also help identify early warning signs and recommend corrective actions to support successful outcomes. |
| DTA | Central Oversight and Monitoring | The DTA's role on digital project boards usually includes:
The DTA has a mandated role for Tier 1 projects as well as projects experiencing delivery difficulty. Advice will be provided to relevant projects. |
| Project Management Office (PMO) | Support | Providing support, for example, on reporting, project management and project governance standards. PMOs may also advise on adherence to agency project governance frameworks, methodologies, and assurance processes; promote continuous improvement and uplift in project delivery maturity across the agency; and provide insights into interdependencies, capacity, and delivery risks across the agency and wider portfolio. |
| Secretariat | Support | Providing support to the Board to comply with corporate and project governance requirements and standards, for example, with meeting administration and ensuring accurate records of meetings. |
Project Risk Manager/Lead Also known as:
| Support | The purpose of the risk role is to take the lead in ensuring that the project has effective processes in place to identify and monitor risks, has access to reliable and up-to-date information about risk and uses the appropriate controls and actions to deal with risks. This role should also ensure that these processes are aligned with enterprise and whole-of-government risk management policy. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
Depending on the size of the project, part or all of the risk manager's role may be subsumed within the project manager's role. |
Project Director Also known as:
To note:
| Reports to board | The project director is accountable to the senior responsible officer for establishing the governance framework and for the day-to-day management of the project, to deliver the outputs and desired outcomes, and realise the required benefits. Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
|
Change Manager To note:
| Reports to board | Change managers may report directly to the project manager or PMO, but can also report to a business lead, business owner, or a separate change management function. These duties may also be integrated into another role such as Director/Manager role. The primary responsibility of an organisational change manager is to develop and implement change management strategies and plans that maximise employee adoption and usage of required changes. The change manager's goal is to drive faster adoption, higher ultimate utilisation of changes, and proficiency with the changes that impact employees who must use the changes in their daily work. These improvements increase benefit realisation, value creation, ROI, and the achievement of results and outcomes. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
|
Benefits Manager To note:
| Reports to board | The purpose of the benefits and value role is to ensure that a consistent 'fit for purpose' approach to benefits and value management is applied across the portfolio or program and that benefits realisation is optimised from the organisation's investment in change. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
Duties may be integrated into another role such as Project Manager role and may be sourced from the PMO. |
| Senior Supplier | Reports to board | The Senior Supplier represents the interests of those designing, developing, facilitating, procuring and implementing the project's product/s. This role is accountable for the quality of the product/s (and its components) delivered by the supplier(s) and is responsible for the technical integrity of the project. If necessary, more than one person may represent the suppliers. The Senior Supplier may be within the agency, for example the CIO, or an external integration partner. Depending on the customer/supplier environment, the customer may also wish to appoint an independent person or group to carry out assurance on the supplier's products (for example, if the relationship between the customer and supplier is a commercial one). Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:
Note: Vendors should not play any Board role in decision-making regarding their own work, such as vendor selection, progress payments, change requests, or readiness assessment. |
Guidance for Senior Responsible Officials
Assurance Research Series 02
References
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Information Flow: Reporting and Communications
Project reporting
Project Board meetings should be regular, scheduled and aligned as much as practical to the organisation's financial reporting cycles, so that the project manager can give timely information on project progress and costs, and to escalate issues beyond their delegation. Most digital project boards meet on a monthly basis and at key decision points, but the frequency of meetings should be adapted to project pace and risk (11), with the possibility of a higher meeting frequency, for example, when the project is close to go-live or release.
The content of board meetings is often influenced by the project manager, supported by key topics in project reports. To keep the board focused on decision-making, reports should focus on exceptions to planned progress, changes to scope, risks and relationships (11). The agenda and supporting project reports will need to adapt to maintain a focus on the critical decisions needed to progress the project (23, 43) .
From the Review of the Modernising Business Registers Program
Project reporting should be "a single source of truth" to reduce reporting burden and to share with internal and external stakeholders, and contain the following (2):
- Key project milestones
- Spend to data and forecast spend to complete
- Earned value (or equivalent) to enable clear monitoring of work completed compared to plan
- Key workforce metrics
- Material risks
- Governance effectiveness metrics – feedback loops on quality of materials, engagement, debate and decision-making (e.g. short survey at end of each meeting)
- Change readiness indicators
- Go-live date
Production of reports for the board divert resources from other project activities. The SRO needs to balance information requests from the board to the project team, with the effort needed to produce them. There is also a tension in the timeliness of information for project reporting. Where possible, board meetings should be scheduled to minimise the lag between report data and the meeting.
The board should regularly reflect on whether all sections of project reports play a role in the decisions the board makes. Removing redundant sections of reports can make it easier to focus on key information and reduce a project reporting burden. Focus for reports should be on exceptions, earned value, and differences between planned and actual progress.
The board maintain responsibility for obtaining the information they need to govern project progress and may need to work with the project manager to ensure they obtain necessary information, moving past a passive information-consumption attitude. Technical jargon should be avoided in reporting in favour of language that allows the board to make trade-off judgements on the business logic and strategic alignment of the project. Board members may have to actively seek outside information if they are to be suitably informed, for example by attending regular project meetings (23, 43), engaging directly with users and operational mechanisms (e.g. walking the shop floor), or conducting informal discussions with stakeholders.
Supporting project documentation
The following table lists some of the common documentation used to support project board formation and decision making. Governance tips from an SRO are also included later in this document.
| Artefacts | Core elements |
|---|---|
| Project Board Terms of Reference (ToR) | The ToR should clearly articulate the scope of the board's remit, authority of the board and its positioning with corporate governance forums and other project governance mechanisms. It should clearly define board roles, potentially including a RACI matrix (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed). The ToR needs to place strongly restrictive conditions on board members use of delegates or proxies. Escalation processes and criteria for exception reporting should be included. These should detail the specific delegated time, cost, quality, or scope change limits that the project manager is delegated to approve, and which must be escalated for board approval. |
| Business Case | It specifies why the project is required, its objectives, intended benefits, and solution strategy. It specifies the parameters within which the project operates (e.g. time, budget, scope), which provide the baseline against which project delivery performance can be measured. |
| Benefits Realisation Plan (BRP) | A BRP outlines how the benefits of an investment will be achieved and measured. Its purpose is to ensure an investment delivers its intended value. The BRP describes the context, structure, and approach to the realisation of planned benefits and is typically developed alongside the business case (at least to initial draft level) to ensure there is a clear plan for the realisation of benefits outlined in the business case. See the DTA's Benefits Management Policy and Toolkit for more information. |
| Benefits Map | A benefit map links the key project benefits and enabling changes on which benefits realisation depends to an organisation's strategic objectives. Benefit mapping and the resulting Benefits Map, is an iterative process which should be revisited multiple times during the investment. This will ensure that unintended consequences and disbenefits are accurately factored into the investment planning process and that the investment remains on track to realise intended benefits. See the DTA's Benefits Management Policy and Toolkit for more information. |
| Stakeholder Impact Assessment | A Stakeholder Impact Assessment identifies who is affected by the project and evaluates the nature of the impact. It assesses relative power of each stakeholder, their interests and readiness for change. The assessment can be utilised to inform engagement strategies and risk mitigation plans. |
| Project Board Papers | Project board papers are produced by the project manager, focusing on decision-making and exception reporting. They are designed to support decisions escalated to the board. They should make clear recommendations, clearly noting the action required (e.g. note or approval). They should be distributed to the board at least 3 days in advance [3-DTA]. Standardising reporting across an agency is recommended to help board members can easily consume information[14-SRO] |
| Assurance Plan | Agencies are required to plan for assurance by applying the Key Principles for Good Assurance and meeting minimum assurance requirements applicable to the tier of the investment. The Assurance Plan is agreed with the DTA and submitted to Cabinet for approval as part of the proposed investment. The Assurance Plan should be regularly reviewed by the board, at least as often as the relevant tier requires. This is key to ensuring the plan continues to be fit-for-purpose. See the Assurance Framework for Digital and ICT Investments for more information. |
Governance tips from an experienced SRO
On structure
- Use defined decision-making frameworks. Treat governance as a “friend” framed around risks
- In my program with >10 projects, each had its own SRO. The formal program board was a decision-making forum, with feedback mechanism to the agency head through to the organisation’s board and across government
- Underneath the program board, I established good delivery governance. I also attended standups with each project and SRO every week to unblock things, clear change protocols and manage dependencies
- To succeed, we needed a high functioning PMO, tracing original requirements to delivery, governance ensuring that “right people are working on right things at right time”
On decision-making
- Ensure clear delegation of decisions and authority between the program and project levels
- Defined project and program tolerances:
- Program level – decision-making sits with SRO. For example, there were 34 milestones. If we shift on those, that is a decision for SRO and minister.
- Project level - decision making authority to make decisions around their milestones, as long as it doesn’t impact delivery of government milestone and SRO has transparency.
Lifecycle
Project Lifecycle and Duration
Project boards should commence at a project's inception. Different skills, capabilities and focus may be required at different stages of a project, and consequently the board composition may need to change. For example, architectural expertise may be more necessary in the design phase, procurement in the planning phase.
In addition, certain events can trigger changes to the project and/or Board. This can include a change in government, turnover of the SRO, handover of project between phases (e.g. after business case approval). These events should also trigger a review of the business case, board charter and composition.
Induction and On-Boarding
The following activities are recommended when standing up a project board, or after significant change [14 - SRO, 1 - SRO]:
- Explain why the project is needed, the outputs and outcomes it is intended to deliver, and high-level project plan
- Provide clarity on roles, positioning of this board with other governance mechanisms and expectations on behaviour
- Understanding of baseline plan so the board know what they are measuring against
- Build capability in the core literacy areas. For example, an agency providing a Managing Successful Projects (45) course so that board members would have common understanding of project principles.
Reflection and Review
There should be a regular reflection and review on the effectiveness of a digital project governance board, as:
- Organisational needs can vary over the project lifecycle
- The external context might have changed, impacting the project's feasibility
- Practices and processes can develop over time, and the board may need to manage reporting impost and regularly 'de-clutter'
- The bespoke nature of digital project governance boards means it may need adjustment to be effective.
Participants for this research recommended having an item on the agenda (quarterly) to review the agenda and papers and remove lower value items. It might also be necessary to change the board composition, meeting cadence or address any cultural issues. The Self-Assessment provided in this document can also be helpful for providing a snapshot of board effectiveness.
Dissolution
Closing down the project board should be aligned with the project benefits being realised or accountability transferred to an operational role, rather than the technical output delivery. It should also align with DTA's Closure reporting standard for digital and ICT-enabled projects (46).
Any lessons learned, for example from post-implementation reviews, should be integrated into project management disciplines in the agency. There should be a formal handover of any remaining risks and benefits to be realised.
Consultation on the Digital Seller Underperformance Policy (DSUP)
The Digital Seller Underperformance Policy (DSUP) is designed to enable fair and transparent management of digital seller underperformance information and drive improved digital project outcomes across Government.
What we need from you
The DTA is seeking feedback from sellers and other industry stakeholders on the draft Policy to ensure the Policy is fair, clear, transparent and proportionate. We want the Policy to support effective collaboration between sellers and Government buyers. Genuine feedback from digital sellers and other industry stakeholders will help us understand industry views and inform the final design of the Policy.
The consultation form below closes on 9 February 2026 at 4pm AEDT.
Before making your submission, please consider the Consultation Fact Sheet and Draft Policy below:
- Consultation Fact Sheet (PDF 416 KB)
- Draft Policy (PDF 335 KB)
Have your say
You can provide a submission through our dedicated form by 9 February 2026 at 4pm AEDT.
test When to apply
Apply Criterion 2 throughout Discovery as you gather research and insights on your target audience. Revisit this Criterion once you go live and assess uptake of your service.
Revisit this criterion across the Service Design and Delivery Process to remain relevant
as users wants and needs evolve.