Critical Skills and Their Impact on Leadership

Strategic Leadership and Project Governance

During my many project close-out workshops involving the project and governance teams from various stakeholder organisations, the lessons learned when investigated deeper were not as obvious as initially thought.

However, what quite frequently became obvious was that the project’s failure can be linked to the project governance team rather than the project delivery team, I’d estimate in about 60% times. This is not limited to any particular industry because the same issues re-appeared across businesses!

When investigating further and digging deeper, what they all had in common was the human factor performance (or lack of), specifically in the area of project governance board (steering committee) and project sponsor roles.

The essentially missing ability to make decisions and support the project team in a timely manner with those decisions created serious issues.

One good example is a multimillion-dollar technology upgrade in the area of transportation systems (mobility).

Initially the problem seemed to point towards the manufacturer of the hardware delaying the production, however, the real issue was actually linked to the software versioning. By the time the control software was implemented, it became obsolete due to the technology jump!

Delaying critical decisions will hinder Project outcomes

So why the delay in making crucial decisions in a timely manner to avoid the slippage?

When asked it became obvious that the steering committee had to be involved in the decision-making process due to the cost implication of the versioning topic. The project manager did what he was meant to do and escalated the matter. And that’s where the problem started.

The steering committee members were either unavailable or simply wouldn’t make the decisions thus hindering the project progress. In this instance, the project team fulfilled their obligations with not much support and “did their best” given the circumstances.

The toll was not only the timeline and the budget but also the human factor leading to some very dissatisfied, stressed employees feeling deserted in times of struggle.

When we looked into who typically is held responsible for the project outcomes the first obvious answer was the delivery team. However, we had to recognise where the escalation process was used correctly surprisingly there were a number of cases where no one from the steering committee would take the responsibility and make a decision or the decisions were not clear or not communicated clearly. The impact on the project was remarkable.

So, how do we define the roles and responsibilities, how do we define the skill set required to achieve the desired outcomes, do we even define them?

Sure, we have job descriptions for the project manager and the core project team member roles, so why don’t we pay the same attention to the members of the project steering committees? If the project is aligned with the strategic goals of the parent organisation, if the governance framework within which the project team performs works well to support the team to deliver in transparent and accountable manner, why is it that the project is allowed to fail due to the lack of clarity of governance arrangement between organisations, roles, responsibilities, skillset and accountability of sponsors?

This topic deserves much needed attention!