Establishing Lean Governance Without Bureaucracy

After your organization has assigned an owner to each process and system and started to centralize documentation, you'll finally need to establish governance.

The role of governance over business processes and systems in your organization is threefold:

1. Identify patterns and set standards as processes and systems evolve, which includes determining whether people within the organization are ready to expand their ownership or become an owner, along with moving people out of that role
2. Resolve conflicts and deviations that result as owners of dependent processes and systems are unable to agree on a path forward or have deviated from the standards set
3. Maintain broader awareness of your organization's strategy and the broader market in which it operates, which includes not only industry peers but also how the same style of business process exists in other industries

Ideally, an owner of a process or system is also cognizant of how peers are tackling challenges and implementing solutions, although the level of focus and exposure is likely different than those participating in a governance capacity.

Governance often conjures images of slow moving, bureaucratic, and potentially overreaching activities that hinder progress. In fairness, that is true for organizations that do not implement governance appropriately.

To avoid falling into that trap, ensure that your organization creates a governance team that:

1. Includes only 2 or 3 people
2. Excludes owners of processes and systems
3. Has cross-functional oversight into the organization's strategy and operations

By reducing the size of the team and avoiding owners participating directly, it ensures that oversight is possible without muddying waters or fostering political issues between owners.

If your organization is on the smaller side or lacks exposure to how other industries operate, it's worth including an external advisor on your governance team, even if they are not responsible for its activities.

And in a somewhat self-serving note, I work with multiple clients in that capacity as part of my advisory offering, plus provide similar advice that is not tailored to any one organization as part of this newsletter.

In practice, the governance team should be passively consuming updates from the owners of processes and systems that result from centralized documentation and issues bubbled up based on a decision and escalation framework.

This reduces the pressure of regular meetings that may remove decision making authority from owners (thus diluting that role) and keeps this as a lean process that does not require hiring additional team members to fill the role of governance.

TLDR: Establish governance to bridge the gap between strategy and ownership of processes and systems, and keep it lean by making it a passive process with few team members.