Summary

As a Project Sponsor you need the active commitment and support of an effective Project Steering Committee to both deliver your project and deliver the associated business value.

Yet, so many Project Steering Committees are ineffectual, dysfunctional and a waste of time. This Guide enables all Sponsors to understand the dynamics and requirements of a successful and effective steering committee, to set the rules of engagement early and take action if the committee is failing to perform.

You’d think all this was obvious; but as any project health checker will testify, most steering committees do not work well. They may attend, look good and sound good, but be rapidly destroying the project’s value or presiding over a disaster in the making.

This is an essential Guide for every Project Sponsor.

NB All of the major project disasters of the past 25 years have been presided over by a governance team that thought it was doing a good job.

Knowing how to manage a governance team, equipping your Steering Committee to succeed and then leading them to success are key requirements of a project sponsor. This Guide equips you for the job.

Benefits

This Guide

1. ensures you know why you have a project steering committee — when their needed and what they’re there to do
2. ensures you don’t create a millstone that hangs around your (and the project’s) neck, slowing it down and destroying value
3. enables you to know when your steering committee is under-performing and know what to do about it
4. ensures you and the committee get the right reporting and information flows to be able to fulfil your role.

Who should read

Project Sponsors and PMOs

Contents

1. The end-to-end project steering committee management process
2. How to identify your need for a project steering committee
3. How to select your project steering committee
4. How to equip your project steering committee
5. How to manage your project steering committee
6. How measure your project steering committee’s effectiveness
7. Understanding steering committee FAQs
8. Understanding steering committee reporting.

In addition, we also provide you with some additional supporting tools and resources to make use of this Guide easy and effective.

Bonus

The role of the Project Steering Committee
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms that summarizes the role of the Steering Committee in descriptive terms.

The Project Governance Team’s measures of success
A value delivery management article by Jed Simms that defines how to know if your project governance team has been successful