Reduce the food mileage of decisions
The Illusion of Control
Decisions are perishable. The longer they take, the further they have to travel from source. The more expensive they grow, and less useful they become.
As pressure to deliver mounts, there is an alarming tendency emerging. Organisations are increasing layers of assurance. Governance is becoming synonymous with reporting, oversight and control. Rather than curating the conditions for successful delivery.
From the programmes I see every day, this has come to signal trouble. The more levels of governance you add, the more you risk creating the illusion of control. The further decisions have to travel from context. The more risk you are actually creating.
As complexity and pressure grow, programmes need to change something fundamental. To lower the food mileage of decisions.
The freshness test
This is becoming the first thing I look at when I work with organisations. A simple observation for determining delivery health.
High mileage decisions: Those that have to travel through multiple meetings or boards, wait for senior stakeholders or sit in busy inboxes. Lose context and relevance quickly. Worse, they dilute accountability, remove agency and rack up costs.
Low-mileage decisions: Made locally, quickly and contextually by the team doing the work. Are usually better informed and less costly.
This isn’t new. “Decisions related to project delivery should be made in a timely manner” - Teal book (4.6.4.5) is government delivery guidance. And yet, in government and large organisations this is most likely to be untrue.
The trap that has been sprung is that as complexity increases, so has the understandable desire to control and manage that. And to move accountability upwards. (With great power comes great responsibility.)
The sad irony is that at best this just overwhelms already swamped individuals. And at worst, creates a slow moving eddy of requests and clarifications. Asymmetric editing of lengthy cases, constant explaining of context and rationale. Teams of people dedicated to the production line of reporting, dashboards, briefing packs and bloated governance software. Over time this gets slower, more expensive and less accurate.
Organisations get so swept away in this, they create industrial levels of assurance theatre. Adding sub-committees and boards, meticulously populating governance databases. Weaving the artifacts of the illusion of control. But the solution to complexity is not more complexity. Instead, allowing decisions to be made by those best placed to make them.
The hidden tax of waiting
The most obvious waste is cost. Time is money after all. Time spent waiting for approvals is time not doing or exploring other things. Uncertainty slows progress. So if for example, you’re running a programme or organisation you should be looking at decision time as a measure of your overall costs. For every team that has to wait a month for a specific board, or sign off there is wasted time and missed opportunity costs.
Add to that the cost of managing the information to support decisions further from the context in which they are made. If teams are spending time converting, translating and relaying information so that those with the power can feel sufficiently informed, then at best you are introducing time delay. And at worst, translation errors that again come at the detriment of accuracy.
Decisions are time limited. Their context is continuously changing. The needs of your customer, the technology environment is constantly changing. If your procurement process takes 12 months to agree funding on a new team. The need and shape of that team will have changed by the time they arrive. If your current approach needs to change to deliver your agreed outcomes or benefits, the longer it takes to pivot the more waste is created. It’s cumulative. Slow decisions increase risk, which adds the desire for yet more assurance which again slows decisions.
So decisions need to arrive quickly enough to be relevant. In organisations governance must be geared towards rapid, transparent and informed decision making. So they arrive fresh enough to be sustaining. Rather than stale or worse. Toxic.
Effective governance requires documented tolerance
Good governance is about maximising the flow of valuable work. that gets left behind because of one fact no amount of encouragement will shift. It would be easy here to say 'you just need to trust your leaders / teams more.' You should, but there is a path that allows this to happen more safely.
An SRO can delegate authority. They cannot delegate accountability. It is their name on the report, and it is they who face the board or a parliamentary accounts committee. So glibly saying "delegate more" asks them to increase their exposure while their liability stays exactly where it was. As budgets grow and public scrutiny rises, the desire for control grows with them. That is not timidity. It is a correct reading of a growing challenge.
Accountability cannot be moved, it can only be made traceable.
When something goes wrong, the question is rarely "did you make this decision". It is "was it reasonable for this decision to be made where it was made". An undocumented delegation cannot answer that. A documented tolerance can. One is a character reference. The other is a design decision.
I know this from the receiving end. A director once documented their delegation of authority to me on a £150m programme, at a relatively junior grade. It set out what I was allowed to decide, and what I needed to escalate. It felt like enormous trust, and pressure. And it was. What made it survivable for the director was that the boundary was written down, with a rationale: decisions belonged where the knowledge was. Of delivery, of customers, of conditions.
The Teal Book already provides for this, though the clearest statement of it sits in the chapter on change control. It says a tiered system of delegation should be defined, with programme and project managers holding tolerances within which they can approve changes without escalation (22.6.1.1). The same clause says escalation delay can be mitigated through delegation and by separating work into streams focused on objectives, so that decisions can be made at a lower level without compromising other work.
The temptation is to start small. Move authority a step or two out from the centre and see how it goes. The problem is not the caution. It is what happens after the first bad month.
Something will go wrong inside a tolerance. It always does. If the reflex is to pull the boundary back in, you have rebuilt the thing you were trying to escape. Pressure produces more control, more control slows decisions, slower decisions produce more pressure. The amber trap, one level down.
So give the boundary a review date and a default direction. The default is to widen it. Narrowing requires a stated reason, recorded against a specific failure or pattern. That way an incident produces a documented judgement rather than a reflex. A delegation schedule that only ever moves one way is not delegation. It is a countdown.
That may sound like yet another framework document. It works the other way round. This is one artefact that removes recurring transactions, where reporting is a recurring artefact that adds them. You write it once and stop queuing.
The more complex your programme is, the closer to delivery your decisions need to be made. Otherwise you may just be participating in very expensive assurance theatre.
Oli Lovell