Peace, Portfolio & Good Governance
When we hear the word ‘Governance’ it rarely causes excitement or passionate debates — it is typically a dry and pedantic topic for the stuffy halls of large institutional buildings. However, good governance design can make whole organizations and systems work smoothly, when the decision making accountabilities are clearly understood, and information flows along the right channels.
Over the past couple of years, the team at Alluvial has been working extensively in the Governance design space – often in collaboration with our colleagues from Openfield. Using a set of lightweight patterns and practices, we have been working with organizations to discover, design and implement custom governance models that suit their product and portfolio needs.
If you’re finding that decision making is woolly or slow; if everyone and no one is trying to drive a conversation, then you might want to follow these 3 steps to putting in place a very non-exciting, but effective governance design.
Governance Discovery
- Interviews, data analysis & insight generation
Governance Design
- Collaborative workshop with model design
Governance Implementation
- Action plan for putting governance into place, including roadmap, training and communications
GOVERNANCE DISCOVERY
Like anything, if you’re going to design a solution; then you need to understand what outcomes you are aiming for. In the governance space, we accomplish this through an initial discussion around outcome that a leadership group is looking for; and then create an Interview Design focused on governance topics.
We’ll then determine a suitable list of participants and conduct anywhere between 8 – 12 interviews (individuals; sometimes pairs) than unpack how they are involved in a specific product or portfolio of work; their understanding of decision making, accountabilities, information flows, budgets and so.
After these are done, a series of themes typically emerge and insights can be generated that will inform what a Governance Design needs to do. Possible Insights could be around a lack of communication; challenges managing stakeholders; unclear cost-sharing models, etc.
COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE DESIGN
Given a Governance Design typically sits in a complex ecosystem of individuals, teams and surrounding organizational layers, it’s best done through a collaborative design approach. Our favoured approach is an in-person workshop where the key players get together to work through Roles & Accountabilities; Funding Models; Relationships and Meeting Architecture.
These rich conversations welcome a wide array of perspectives and opinions and work towards a Governance Model that everyone feels they have contributed to and meets the specific needs of a product or portfolio’s context.
(A walk-in RASCI)
GOVERNANCE IMPLEMENTATION
Often there is already some governance scaffolding in place and so it becomes a question of which pieces need to be augmented with the new design or deconstructed entirely. Over a period of a couple of months, the new design is put into place, with appropriate communications and change management support provided for anyone involved. After letting it run for 6 – 9 months, we recommend a retrospective to see if any components need to be tuned.
And that is how you can discover, design and implement good governance in your organization.
