When Less Governance Is More: A Project Recovery Story
This account describes a composite of real situations, with identifying details changed. The patterns it reflects are common in public-sector and capital project environments across Canada in 2022.
The project was a clinical information system modernisation for a regional health authority — a multi-year, multi-million-dollar implementation that would touch every clinical unit in the region. At eighteen months in, it was six months behind schedule and had consumed 30 percent more budget than planned at this stage. The project manager's monthly report to the programme director was 22 pages long. The project had three standing committees: a technical steering committee (12 members, meeting weekly), an executive steering committee (9 members, meeting bi-weekly), and a clinical advisory group (15 members, meeting monthly). Together, these groups were consuming approximately 40 hours of senior staff time per week — more than a full-time position — in meetings that the project manager acknowledged were not producing decisions.
The Diagnosis: Governance as Overhead, Not Support
An external review conducted at month 18 found that the three committees were operating at different information levels but not at different authority levels. The technical steering committee was discussing architecture decisions that should have been delegated to the project team. The executive steering committee was reviewing operational status it lacked the context to interpret. The clinical advisory group was being asked to approve clinical workflow changes in a format that required the project team to explain the context for 20 minutes before the approval could be considered. The result was that everything moved slowly, nothing was anyone's clear responsibility, and the project manager spent as much time preparing for governance meetings as managing the project.
What Was Changed and What It Produced
The three committees were collapsed into one: a six-person executive steering committee meeting monthly. The chair was the project sponsor with genuine authority to commit resources and approve scope changes. Members were the four business unit heads most affected by the project and one clinical lead.
The technical steering committee became an internal working group with no attendance by executives. Technical decisions within the agreed scope were delegated to the project team with a simple escalation criterion: any decision that would affect cost, timeline, or clinical scope by more than a defined threshold went to the steering committee.
The monthly steering package was reduced to a four-page document: one page of RAG status by workstream, one page of risks and issues requiring a decision, one page of financial summary, one page of decisions requested with the project manager's recommended resolution.
Decisions were documented within 48 hours and circulated to all affected parties. The project manager was given documented authority to make operational decisions within defined parameters without committee approval.
Within three months of the restructure, the project had recovered four weeks of the schedule gap. More importantly, the project manager reported that the quality of steering committee engagement had improved substantially: members came prepared, discussions were focused on decisions rather than status, and escalated issues were resolved at the first meeting rather than deferred.
The Transferable Lessons
Match committee authority to committee information. A committee that does not have the context to make a decision is not a governance body — it is a rubber stamp on a good day and a delay generator on a bad one.
Delegate operational decisions to the project manager. The project manager should be able to make the vast majority of day-to-day project decisions without committee approval. Reserve committee decisions for changes that exceed defined authority thresholds.
Make the decision the unit of governance. Governance should be measured by the quality and speed of decisions, not by the number of meetings or pages of documentation.
Right-size the committee to the risk level of the project. A $500,000 project and a $50 million project do not need the same governance structure. The governance overhead should be proportional to the decisions that need to be made.
XNM has helped public-sector and capital-project clients restructure programme governance to match the actual decision-making needs of complex implementations. To discuss how governance design could support your project recovery or launch, reach out to XNM's program & project delivery advisory team.