Governance
Industry: Government / Technology Sectors
Capability: Governance: Building a Corporate Governance Structure to aid Decision-Making
The Situation
Our Government client’s governance structure consisted of a number of boards and committees that were not well distinguished or understood.
As a result, key decisions were not always staffed efficiently or decided at the appropriate organizational level. Further, it was not clear there was sufficient alignment between the strategic intent and the strategic plans for the individual groups.
Our client faced operating under a new business paradigm: continue to deliver in a climate of increasing requirements and restricted resources, and did not have an overarching enterprise perspective necessary to make difficult trade-offs to accomplish the organization’s strategic goals.
The Strategy Bridge Solution
The Strategy Bridge consulting team concluded that a more robust “corporate” strategy and decision-making processes to plan for—and respond to—current and future challenges was needed. The team met with the senior leaders over a period of several weeks, facilitating a discussion on the “as is” view of the current governance process and then determining what was working and what was not working.
We focused on helping our client create a governance structure that would establish a more effective and efficient process for enterprise-level decisions regarding status of strategic initiatives and investments; budget; policy; process management and improvements; metrics; and Human Resources management. We recommended a corporate decision-making process for cross-cutting issues and an efficient mechanism for closing on actions. We also recommended a strategic planning process that fosters better alignment between the corporate strategic intent and the individual group strategies.
The Outcome
The Governance Structure consulting activity resulted in our client implementing the proposed Governance Structure Policy as described above. The Policy clearly articulated an overarching framework to enable integrated, corporate-wide decision-making; and it was positvely received by all stakeholders upon implementation. Our client experienced success in implemenation due to the effort they put forth in establishing roles and responsibilities for each corporate body, thereby allowing decsions to be made at the right level and governance effectively executed.
