Program Governance

163

12

Factors Affecting Program Governance

“I need to get approval for this,” replied the program director. In 2010, I

was part of an advisory panel where our main goal was to retrack a com-

petence enhancement program (CEP) for a certain government entity in

the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC). is program included multiple

initiatives, each of which was focused toward improving the eciency of

the department in dierent areas such as:

1. Organizational structuring

2. Soware development

3. Tactical operations

ese initiatives were aligned together under a CEP, which had a vision

to improve the department’s operational eciency, resulting in better ser-

vices to its customers. One of our recommendations was to improve the

visibility of the program by placing banners in the department that had

program objectives inscribed on it. e cost of implementing this sug-

gestion was approximately $2,700, which was less than 0.0015% of the

program’s actual budget. But the program director had to approve this

amount even though he had this buer available. Upon inquiry he men-

tioned that according to the framework designed in 1998, the program

directors had a spending power of $1,000 without approval of the board!

No one had attempted to revisit the framework for twelve years, resulting

in an approval authority misaligned with programs in the current con-

text. Needless to say, getting the approval took the program director four

weeks. If the governance framework’s design team considered dierent

factors such as prevailing market conditions while designing a governance

framework for CEP, this valuable time could have been saved.

164 • Program Governance

Corporate governance has a signicant impact on the governance

frameworks of the contained temporary organizations. However, there are

various other factors which are unique to programs and have an impact on

program governance framework. is chapter discusses dierent factors

that inuence the program governance framework.

is inuence can be on any element of the program governance frame-

work, whether identication of program governance domains, which gov-

ernance functions to apply, or what should be the governance structure or

the design of the governance mechanism.

ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS

e governance of program comes under the umbrella of corporate gov-

ernance, which is governed by the industry under which the organization

is operating with each industry having its own set of governance require-

ments. us, the same governance regime cannot be applied uniformly

to all types of programs as dierent programs might require dierent

regulatory compliance. Winch (2001) states that “the range of governance

options open to any rm is limited by the institutional context within

which it trades” (p. 799).

Corporate Governance

Crawford et al. (2008) look at corporate governance as more of a stable

function in organizations, whereas the governance of a project/program

may dier from one another. However, there should be some sort of consis-

tency between them in the sense that the governance of a project/program

should not be in conict with the governance needs of the organization.

ey look at compliance and audit aspects of corporate governance and

treat support as a separate function (Crawford et al. 2008). Both of these

functions in combination form the basis on which the responsibilities of

project/program governance, in general, and the sponsor, in particular,

are dened.

While focusing on projects, Müller (2011) mentions that agreements

and contracts are made ex ante project planning and execution, and act

as a basis for governance setup for the project. ese contracts should

abide by the corporate governance function of the organization. In case