Deployment Governance

Owned by Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Oct 24, 2022
3 min read

Introduction

Programme and project governance essentially describes three things:

Structure

The organisation’s structure and environment have to support the project. That means senior management is willing to invest time and energy to establish a vision for project managers to take forward. The “structure” element of project governance describes not just the immediate project team, but the organisation as a whole.

People

Investing in effective project managers and other team members is key to any project. Not only do the people need to be in place but the work to be done (effort and time) also needs to be understood. Goals need to be clear, reachable and sustainable.

Information

Knowing where to find information, on what channels new information is shared and how information can be discussed is essential for all parties involved in a project. Regardless of how many goals are set or what the vision is, every project will suffer without clear and consistent information sharing.

Structure - Programme or Project Board

The project board represents the most senior level of management within the project management team. Project board members are accountable for the work they direct, but the extent of their business responsibilities is usually much wider than the project. They can rarely afford to get involved in the detail of every project for which they are responsible. This means that the effectiveness with which they delegate responsibility for the different aspects of the project is crucial.

To fully understand the project board’s responsibilities, it is important to be aware of the underlying duties and the behaviours that are expected of the board members (see below). Why is this important? Because lack of executive/senior management support is frequently cited as one of the top causes of project failure.

PKB recommends that the board is made up with representation from all senior stakeholders in the project.

Reporting into the board as necessary will be representation from each of the core workstreams: Information Governance, Integrations, Registrations, Communications, Training, Support, Clinical Transformation and Sustainability

Below is a list of key duties and behaviours of a board:

  • Be accountable

  • Ensure effective communication

  • Provide unified direction

  • Commit resources and funding

  • Support project team

  • Delegate effectively

  • Ensure effective decision making

People

Senior Responsible Officer

The SRO is the visible owner of the overall business change, accountable for successful delivery and is recognised throughout the organisation as the key leadership figure in driving the change forward, together with personal responsibility for ensuring that it meets its objectives and realises the expected benefits. The role is responsible for establishing the new environment resulting from the programme, meeting the new business needs and delivering new levels of performance, benefit, service delivery, value or market share. The SRO ‘owns’ the Business Case.

Programme or project manager

Each PKB deployment has a dedicated PKB Success Project Manager and it's essential to have a customer side counterpart. In smaller deployments the person that takes on the project management role may not be a full time dedicated project manager by trade, however in a standard (typically a hospital-wide) deployment this is required. In larger deployments such a region wide deployment, typically these will be run as a programme with a central programme manager and organisation level project managers.

Team Lead

Depending on the size of the project, the team(s) involved may report directly to the Project Manager or indirectly via Team Leads / Work Stream Managers. The Team Lead’s/Work Stream Managers responsibility is to achieve the completion of the Product(s) or Work Packages allocated to the team, using whichever quality processes have been agreed for the project and meeting the product’s Quality Criteria.

Team Member

The Team Members within a project are responsible for delivering the ‘technical’ products. Teams may be cross-functional (i.e. composed of people from different parts of the participating organisation(s) and brought together temporarily for the specific purposes of the project) or functional (i.e. working in a specialist function which is acting as a supplier to the project).

For more information - please refer to the recommended roles and resources page

Information

It's often said communication is 90% of a project manager's role. Whether that number is higher or lower for any given deployment, it's certainly a major component of the role.

Communicating project information to customers is a daily activity for PKB Success Team Project Managers. So it's important to make this accurate, detailed enough to give a full picture of the deployment, yet efficient too.

We are dedicated to a spirit of openness, transparency and proactive planning and problem-solving. We tie much of this together with our collaborative approach to project management and via our reporting to customer project teams.

Please refer to the Teamwork and Weekly Project Report pages for more information.