What is Operational Governance?
Operational Governance allows you to state your policies as business processes and ensures that established business policies are followed throughout all operations of the organization. With operational governance, policies are aligned from the business to the operational aspects of the enterprise, allowing you to control and run your business better.
Governance is crucial to all businesses. Many acknowledge governance as a significant area of improvement needed to well manage the people and processes that deliver the products and services provided by the company.
“Accurate, timely and relevant information is crucial to guide and monitor the delivery of programmes” – National Audit Office 2020
Why does it Matter?
Good governance allows for key decisions to be made with confidence throughout the project life cycle. Governance arrangements will also develop during the project which is why it is important to reassess them at main transition points/approval points. This ensures that the expectations of key stakeholders are managed throughout. Although project governance exists only for the life of the project, it should support the wider and long-term corporate governance of the sponsor organisation.
Operations Governance at Execview
The operations module in Execview is used to track the performance of service providers, whether internal, external or outsource partners. It presents one consistent view of service delivery KPIs to define and track performance and processes across your organisation.
Key features of the operations module include:
- Supporting stakeholder engagement in key activities
- Reporting on operational activities against CSFS, With KPIs, SLAs
- Integration to any source of flat data files, spreadsheets – with ETL for export transform and load of data in Execview
- Customisable reports for all participants
This combined with our other key functionalities at Execview will allow for the development of a successful project.
Murray, A. (2011) White Paper: PRINCE2 and Governance, November 2011, London, The Stationary Office.
The image above displays Murray’s explanation of good governance. He states the essential elements of good project governance include:
(1) Alignment to organisational objectives: projects run by an organisation should show the contribution to the organisation’s objectives. With this clearly indicated, the project context is clear and governance of the project can make sure that it is centred on the outcome rather than activities.
(2) The golden thread of delegated authority: this is where each person must know their authority and what needs to be referred to a higher level of authority within the chain.
(3) Reporting: Periodically reporting on progress is essential.
(4) Independent Assurance: this is a counterbalance to self-reporting and is an independent check of the structures and processes to review whether the objectives will be met.
(5) Decisions gates: at specified points in the project life cycle, it is good to provide formal points of control where a decision is made to permit or renew authority for the project to continue.
Demonstrating good governance is about clarity of roles and responsibilities about processes as well as the relationships between people and within an organisation.
