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Establish Governance Structure-OLD

Updated on July 18, 2019

Your project team should embrace a formal, multi-level governance process to keep the project on track. Once the governance structure has been agreed upon, it is important to maintain the discipline of one common business and technical governance model, to reduce confusion of who is in charge and who plays what role on the project. In this context, functional titles become less important.

What

As you finalize preparations to move to the next Build Phase of the project, you initiate the regular Governance cadences you defined and agreed upon. These meetings identify, resolve and escalate issues as appropriate, with an emphasis on resolution at the lowest possible level.

Typically, these are structured as:

  • Corporate governance meetings
    • Ensure understanding at a corporate level
    • Provide an overview of all interactions between companies
    • Review and resolve escalated issues between companies
  • Executive governance meetings
    • Address cross-program issues
    • Resolve relationship issues
    • Communicate current status and priorities
    • Confirm actions by all stakeholders
  • Project-level governance meetings
    • Resolve cross-departmental issues impacting Pega resources or software
    • Provide understanding of current status and priorities
    • Confirmation actions and dependencies across the towers
  • Team-level governance
    • Address issues from weekly status
    • Resolve tower-level issues, priorities, and risks
    • Identify items to raise to program sponsor
    • Resolve cross-stakeholder issues

 There may be other Governance meetings which may be created, for example, a dedicated technical Governance meeting where application quality in guardrail, testing and defect review, status of testing automation and other similar technical topics are reviewed. There may be program level Governance meetings, if this project is part of a broader program, where team velocity, quality, team productivity, integration related issues and other program level items are discussed.

Why

This governance model ensures that the implementation’s goals are achieved through

  • Monitoring of
    • Process
    • Achievement against plan
    • Budget
  • Management and escalation of issues and risk
  • Control of change and scope

When the Governance model is well planned and executed, the project team will benefit from expedited decision making, issue resolution, and on time feedback for open questions, to help keep the project on schedule.

 How

As part of the Governance Plan, an Engagement Governance Workbook should be created that includes a communication plan to identify the “right-sized” communication strategy at regular intervals with different stakeholders. This plan will keep everyone on the team updated on the project’s progress. Besides weekly status reports, most of the communication exchange will be during the daily standup’s “inspect and adapt” activities and at bi-weekly, monthly or other scheduled meetings as defined in the governance plan.

It is important to think about the reports required to support the governance process and enable project progress to be shared with stakeholders. Examples for creating project progress reporting (burn downs and defects) can be found here <link>.

When issues or questions are raised and resolved in a timely manner within the construct of the Governance plan and at the right meetings, any resulting blocks or impediments are resolved much quicker to prevent the project momentum from slowing down.

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