By the time the project formally starts, the governance story is already partly written.

The budget has been approved. The sponsor has been identified. The timeline has been communicated, internally and sometimes externally. The problem the program exists to solve has been framed in terms that different executives understand differently. The trade-offs that will be required when things get difficult have not been discussed.

All of these are governance conditions. None of them were recognized as governance decisions when they were made.

The Governance Condition

Organizations do not approve transformations. They approve components. The approval is given on the basis of what the component is described to be. What is not examined at the point of approval is what is being assumed. The budget assumes a level of data quality that has not been assessed. The timeline assumes a level of organizational readiness that has not been tested.

In one global consumer products business, the transformation budget was approved in Q3. By Q1 of the following year, when the systems integrator was contracted, the scope had expanded to include three additional business units, a cloud migration not part of the original approval, and a data governance workstream the original budget had not accounted for. Each expansion was individually defensible. None had been anticipated at approval. The budget revision was described as a scope change. The more accurate description: the budget had been approved before anyone fully understood what the work involved.

The year before the project is also when technology preferences establish themselves as assumptions rather than inputs. In one multi-country retail transformation, a preference for a specific integration architecture expressed informally by a senior leader during the pre-program period had embedded itself so deeply that by the time the SI began formal scoping, the architecture was treated as a constraint. Its suitability for the program's actual requirements was never formally evaluated. The governance structure that might have surfaced that evaluation did not exist yet.

Executive alignment is not established at kick-off. The conditions for executive alignment are established in the conversations, assumptions, and informal commitments made in the months before the project formally exists.

Governance Pattern: Unrecognized Pre-Program Governance Decisions

Observed when:

  • The program budget was established before a detailed assessment of data quality, process maturity, or integration complexity was conducted
  • The timeline was communicated externally before the scope was fully understood
  • The executive sponsor was identified before their governance mandate was formally defined
  • The business case was approved on the basis of assumptions about organizational readiness that were not independently tested
  • The trade-offs the program will eventually require the executive layer to make have not been discussed before delivery begins

Commercial consequence:

Budget pressure originating in pre-program assumptions that were never tested, appearing during delivery as cost overruns rather than assumption corrections. Timeline commitments that cannot be formally revised without executive consequence.

If This Feels Familiar
  • The program's original business case no longer accurately describes what the program is delivering.
  • The budget is under pressure in ways that trace back to assumptions made before discovery was complete.
  • Different executives have different views of what the program was approved to deliver.
  • The timeline was communicated externally before the scope was fully understood.
  • The governance structure is being used to manage disagreements that would have been resolved differently if surfaced before the program began.

Board Questions

1.What decisions have already been made about this program that will shape it regardless of what the governance structure decides later?
2.Which assumptions inside the business case have been independently tested against organizational reality?
3.Has the executive layer reached explicit agreement on what trade-offs are acceptable if the program must choose between timeline, scope, quality, and cost?
4.Who will own the benefits the program is designed to deliver? Have those people accepted that ownership?
5.What does the organization need to have prepared before the SI is appointed that has not yet been prepared?

Governance Intervention

Transformation Alignment and Readiness Review. A structured assessment of the organization's readiness before the program formally begins. Examines the assumptions the program is being built on and establishes which have been tested and which have not.

Executive Alignment Review. Structured facilitation of the executive questions that governance cannot answer after the fact. Conducted before the SI is appointed.

Business Case Assurance. Independent review of the business case before commitment, examining whether assumptions are shared, benefits are owned, and the review mechanism will function once delivery begins.

TRC Solutions provides independent governance for SAP and ERP transformation programs. The Governance Engine is the institutional framework through which TRC carries that accountability.