Protecting senior management time on project boards

Incontrovertibly, senior management time is valuable. However, many organisations typically take a 1:1 relationship when establishing a project board. That is, one project board is established per project. Depending on the organisational size and depth, this will often result in the same senior management people fulfilling the same business, user and supplier interest roles across multiple project boards impacting their time to think about strategic priorities and required business model changes to stay competitive.

In Lean, this is identified as a non-value added waste called “excess processing” or a sign of a poorly designed process that could be related to management or administrative issues. In this context, it relates to inefficiencies in governance structures and operations. So, to minimise valuable senior management time (i.e. time being a finite commodity that cannot be recovered once used), sponsoring organisations ought to rationalise their existing project boards to primarily focus on decision making rather than blur the core purpose with stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is typically covered by appropriate user and supplier group representation, by one or two people that covers their collective influence, interests, and concerns.

A proven approach which I’ve successfully implemented within a Queensland Government department was to establish three “category-based” sub-portfolio boards to replace 10 separate project boards based on service provision i.e. HR, finance and enterprise areas of the business. To ensure run the organisation (through BAU activities) and change the organisation (through projects and programmes) was not separated from strategy and vision, I successfully proposed for the respective BAU activities to report to the relevant sub-portfolio board, so senior management had complete visibility of the accumulative business change impact, risk and any request for change. 

To minimise senior management time, and to eliminate non-value added waste, sponsoring organisations should rationalise their multiple project boards. They should instead consider establishing category based sub-portfolio boards based on strategic objectives, benefits categories, funding sources, risks categories i.e. business, service or external, technology segments and/or service provision. Whatever is decided by the main investment board to support the portfolio management process, these categories ought to be based on what the organisation is planning to achieve in terms of digital strategy execution and the subsequent business model changes to processes, organisational structure, technology and/or information (POTI) model. They should have the authority to prioritise their respective work within delegated limits.

When deciding on membership, remember that the decision should not be dictated by the corporate organisational structure particularly the level of the hierarchical position if you want to instil delegated authority. The golden rule is that the project owner accountable for the success of the project is influenced by two factors. Firstly, the proposed person needs to be high enough in the organisational hierarchy to have the authority to make an investment capital decision. However, they also need to be low enough in the organisational hierarchy to make the time commitment. Ideally, it should be someone from operational service with “skin in the game” who volunteers to drive and champion the proposed business change and to realise the benefits that underpin capital investment. They should also have a vested interest to scrutinise project information and evidence as an indicator of actual progress and performance.

To effectively pitch the proposed business change, it’s important to sell the benefits to those ultimately accountable for the project including the main investment board to approve and lead the change. The best way I have found to successfully achieve this is to “test the waters” with a few key stakeholders to assess initial support and to also garner valuable feedback about the proposed change. It’s about bringing people along the journey to discover an improved way of establishing and operating project governance structures. Since less bureaucracy will result in faster capital investment decision making, less complexity and more transparency allows project teams to be more responsive to risks, opportunities and environmental changes. 

I did this by developing diagrams of the proposed structure (since a picture is worth a thousand words), an image can be more effective than a mere verbal description of the proposed change. However, this should not underestimate the influence of good benefits articulation that includes reduced time commitment and operational efficiencies. After all, pragmatically applying project management methodologies often requires organisations to think outside the box and to contextualise the guidance to suit the organisational environment while achieving the intended results. Like the Praxis Framework states

“Good governance minimises the risk from change and will help maximise benefits. It also promotes the continued development of the discipline and profession of project, programme and portfolio management.”