I have sat in more Steering Committee meetings than I care to count. The slides are polished. The Gantt chart is colorful. The status is "Green." Everyone nods, drinks the lukewarm coffee, and agrees to meet again next week.
Three weeks later, that same project is suddenly "Red," six months behind schedule, and requiring a budget variance request. The Steering Committee—supposedly the ultimate safeguard of project health—didn't prevent the crash. It just watched it happen in slow motion.
This is the paradox of modern enterprise governance. We build massive structures to control risk, but we inadvertently build structures that manufacture delay. We confuse reporting with executing.
The data confirms this theater. According to Gartner, 60% of Project Management Offices (PMOs) are shut down within three years because they fail to demonstrate value. They become bureaucratic overhead rather than strategic enablers. Even worse, recent studies show that Project Managers spend approximately 4 hours per week purely on reporting—generating slides that few read and fewer act upon. That is 10% of your most valuable talent's time spent looking backward instead of driving forward.
If you are a CIO or VP of Engineering stuck in committee deadlock, you don't have a resource problem. You have a governance problem. Your governance model is likely optimized for blame avoidance, not speed.
Most distressed projects I enter have impeccable documentation. They have Risk Registers with 50 items. They have weekly status meetings. What they don't have is speed.
The root cause of most delays isn't code complexity or vendor failure; it's Decision Latency—the time elapsed between a team identifying a blocker and leadership making a decision to resolve it. In a stalled digital transformation, this latency compounds. A 48-hour delay on a firewall rule approval doesn't just push the project back two days; it context-switches the engineering team, kills momentum, and pushes the sprint into the next holiday window.
Research from the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Plaky reveals a startling correlation: organizations that can make decisions in under one hour have a 40% higher project success rate than those taking five hours or more. Speed is not just a variable; it is the determinant factor.
When we audit stalled portfolios, we often find that "governance" creates a waiting room. Teams wait for the weekly SteeringCo to approve a change request. They wait for the monthly Architecture Review Board (ARB) to bless a design. This waiting is invisible on the Gantt chart until it's too late.
Real governance is not about asking "Are you on track?" It is about asking "What is in your way?" and removing it immediately. If your governance structure cannot resolve a cross-functional deadlock within 24 hours, it is not governance. It is an expensive obstruction.
If you have a critical initiative stuck in the mud, adding more status reports will not save it. You need to dismantle the theater and install a triage system.
Stop the weekly hour-long status readouts. Replace them with a daily 15-minute Decision Desk. The rule is simple: if the project team encounters a blocker that requires executive authority (budget, resources, cross-departmental agreement), they lodge it by 9:00 AM. The executives meet at 10:00 AM. A decision is made by 10:15 AM. No decision is allowed to age more than 24 hours.
Nobody reads your 50-line Risk Register. It is a graveyard where risks go to be documented so that someone can say "I told you so" later. Replace it with a Blocker Board. Only active, immediate impediments go here. Practical project governance focuses on the top 3 things killing you today, not the 50 things that might hurt you next year.
Stop measuring "Percent Complete" (it is a fiction). Start measuring Block Time: the number of hours a critical path task sits in a "waiting" state. In our 30-day governance fix engagements, we often see Block Time drop from 120 hours/week to nearly zero. When Block Time drops, velocity recovers automatically.
Governance is not about control. It is about velocity. If your process isn't making the team faster, cut it.
