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Project and Program Governance

Using Senior Management Support to Ensure Project Success

Senior management support is essential.

Your business case is approved, your project team is in place, and you're ready to go. You have agreement on all the resources you need. You're confident that you're going to deliver on time, to quality, and within budget. The project's success seems to be guaranteed... But how often do things actually work out as smoothly as this?

Then resources that you thought had been assigned to your project start to disappear… Experts that you need are allocated elsewhere. The data storage that you had stated as critical will no longer be provided, because another project has been delayed. Other stakeholders hear about your project, and it becomes obvious to you that the project's scope should be extended to include their needs, but you don't have the funding to do this.

How could you have prevented this? The answer is to have strong project governance in place. This won't necessarily stop these issues from occurring, however, it will ensure that you have the right senior management support lined up and motivated to help you to resolve problems quickly and successfully.

In this article, we'll explain what project governance is, we'll look at some useful governance mechanisms, and we'll give you a checklist that you can use to choose the approach that's right for your project.