Who Actually Provides Oversight on a Project?
Oversight gets confused with meetings. A project with a steering group, a delivery board, a design authority, a programme review and a monthly assurance check has a great deal of attention on it and may have no oversight at all, if none of those forums can decide anything. Meanwhile a small project with no forum whatever can be overseen perfectly well by one sponsor who reads what arrives and answers within a day.
Section 2.4.1 of The Standard for Project Management describes providing oversight and coordination as a function that has to occur, without prescribing who performs it. That framing is the useful one, because it moves the question from what committees exist to whether the work is actually being done, and by whom.
Oversight is a function, not a committee
It can be performed by different people on different projects. A sponsor alone on a small piece of work, a steering group on a programme, a design authority for technical decisions, a PMO for portfolio-level coordination, an independent assurance function on something high-risk. The arrangement should follow the project's exposure, and copying the arrangement from the last big programme onto a small one produces ceremony without benefit.
The test is decision capability. A forum where nobody present can approve money, change a date, resolve a conflict between departments or stop the work is a briefing. Briefings are useful and they are not oversight, and labelling one as the other means the decisions that need taking are not going anywhere.
Four things somebody has to be doing
Checking the work is on course. Someone outside the delivery team looking at progress, forecast and risk, with enough understanding to ask an awkward question and enough distance to want to. This is the most commonly performed of the four and the easiest to do superficially.
Checking it is still worth doing. Returning to the justification when circumstances change, and being willing to stop. This belongs with whoever owns the business case, and it is the function most often absent entirely.
Checking the risks are being managed, not just recorded. Somebody asking what has actually been done about the three largest exposures since last time. A register reviewed without that question is an inventory.
Taking the decisions the project cannot. Money above delegation, a date affecting other commitments, a conflict between two departments, an escalation about a supplier. If nobody is doing this, the project will either stall or make the decisions itself without the standing to do so, and both have consequences.
Five forums and one key on a hook
A utilities network operator ran a programme replacing control and telemetry equipment across a region. It had five governance bodies: a programme board, a technical design authority, a monthly operations interface meeting, a portfolio review and an assurance gate process.
The programme was well attended and slow. Over a five-month period it accumulated four decisions it could not take: the sequencing of outages against the operational plan, whether to fund an extra spares holding, a change of standard for a communications protocol, and whether a regional site would be included.
Each decision was taken to a forum and each forum declined it, correctly, because none of them held the authority. The board was chaired by a director who did not own the operational plan, the design authority could decide technical standards only within an approved budget, the operations interface was an information exchange, and the portfolio review was concerned with the whole capital programme rather than one part of it.
The control room where they met made the point better than any diagram. A key-operated switch on the panel, its keyway empty, and the key on a hook board by the door on the far side of the room: the authority existed, it was visible, and it was not within reach of anybody sitting at the desk.
What resolved it was a single page listing decision types against a named individual, agreed by the programme director and the operations director in about half an hour. Three of the four outstanding decisions were settled in the following fortnight by the people the page identified, two of them without any meeting at all.
Right-sizing it
Match oversight to exposure. A project with a low budget, reversible decisions and no regulatory dimension needs a sponsor who answers promptly. A programme with public money, safety implications and several organisations needs more, and the effort is justified. Applying either arrangement to the other kind of project wastes something valuable.
Write down who decides what, and who chairs it. One page, names rather than roles where possible, agreed at the start. It takes half an hour and it prevents the specific failure above, which is decisions circulating among bodies that are each conscientiously unable to take them.
For a PMP® candidate, the useful reading is that oversight is a function that somebody must perform, so a scenario about a decision moving between forums is describing authority that has never been assigned. A response that adds a governance meeting adds another place for the decision to visit. A structured PMP exam preparation course practises situations where attention is plentiful and decision-making capacity is not.
Take the last decision your project escalated and trace what happened to it. If it visited more than one forum before being settled, or is still moving, the map of who decides what does not exist in a usable form, and drawing it is a half-hour job with a large return.
Interested in going further?
Projects are rarely short of meetings and frequently short of somebody able to decide. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through governance as a set of decision rights rather than a set of forums.
Oversight and coordination are among the project functions in The Standard, published with the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
A026: How Project Managers Provide Organisational Insight
A067: How Your Organisation Limits or Enables Agile Delivery
A091: Project Governance vs Organisational Governance: What’s the Difference?
A027: Project Manager, Sponsor, Product Owner and Team: Who Does What?
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
