Governance Structure: Keeping an Improvement Alive Long After Handover

The Governance Structure tool does one job. It defines the governance bodies, roles and decision rights that oversee the sustained process. Nothing more, nothing less.

You use it in the Sustain phase of RDMAICS, once the control plan exists and the improvement is ready to hand over. By that point the project team is winding down. The question is no longer whether the new process works. The question is who will notice, and who can act, when it stops working.

Most improvements do not fail loudly. They drift. A step gets skipped during a busy week. A vacancy goes unfilled. A system change quietly undoes a control. Governance is the mechanism that catches drift early, because somebody is meeting, somebody is looking at the measure, and somebody has the authority to decide what happens next.

Build the structure before handover, not after. If you wait until the first problem appears, you will spend the first month arguing about who owns the decision instead of fixing the process.

Everything below is built on the sample data that ships with the tool. It describes governance over an accounts payable process after an improvement project. The example is fictional. It is there so you can see the shape of a complete answer before you write your own.

The sample contains four governance bodies. A Steering Committee, an Ops Review, a Daily Huddle and an Audit Forum. Each has members, a mandate, a set of decision rights, a cadence and a named chair.

The four bodies sit at different altitudes. The Daily Huddle sees individual issues on the day they occur. The Steering Committee sees funding and scope across a quarter. Between them sit the weekly operational view and the monthly compliance view. That layering is the point. One body cannot hold all four horizons.

The tool works from a simple table. Each row is one governance body. The columns are Governance Body, Members, Mandate, Decision Rights, Cadence and Chair. Three of those are marked as required: the body, the mandate and the chair.

In the sample, the Steering Committee has Sponsor, MBB and Process Owner as members, holds a mandate of strategic oversight, decides on funding and scope changes, meets quarterly, and is chaired by the Sponsor. The Ops Review brings together the Process Owner, the AP Manager and the Black Belt, carries the mandate for operational performance, decides on process changes and resources, meets weekly, and is chaired by the Process Owner.

The Daily Huddle is the AP team and the AP Manager. Its mandate is daily execution. Its decision right is issue triage. It meets daily and the AP Manager chairs it. The Audit Forum is the Black Belt and the Process Owner, with a mandate of compliance assurance, a decision right over corrective actions, a monthly cadence and the Black Belt in the chair.

Write the mandate in a few words, not a paragraph. If you cannot say what a body is for in five words, the body probably overlaps with another one.

The tool summarises the table into a small set of counts and a cadence statement. For the sample data it reports four governance bodies, four of four with a chair, four of four with decision rights, and six people or roles in membership.

Those four numbers are the health check. Bodies tells you how many forums exist. With a chair tells you how many have clear accountability for running. With decision rights tells you how many can actually conclude something. People or roles in membership tells you how wide the net is.

The cadence line is the other half of the read. In the sample it reports the Daily Huddle daily, the Ops Review weekly, the Audit Forum monthly and the Steering Committee quarterly, and confirms that each body has a named chair. Read that line as a ladder. Problems should escalate up it and decisions should come back down it.

Six people or roles across four bodies also tells you something about load. The Process Owner appears in three of the four bodies. The Black Belt appears in two. Overlap is intentional, because it carries context between forums. Too much overlap and you have one meeting wearing four hats.

The tool also offers an AI review that explains the result in plain language if you want a second read on the structure you have built.

A good governance table answers a practical question: where does this go. When an issue appears, the table tells you which forum owns it and who chairs that forum.

In the sample, a single invoice exception on a Tuesday goes to the Daily Huddle, because its decision right is issue triage. A recurring pattern that needs a change to the process or extra people goes to the Ops Review, because that body decides on process changes and resources. A control failure with compliance consequences goes to the Audit Forum, because corrective actions sit there. A request that needs money or a change of scope goes to the Steering Committee, because funding and scope changes are its decision rights.

That routing removes a common source of delay. Nobody has to decide where to take a problem, because the decision was made in advance and written down.

It also protects the senior forum. If the Steering Committee meets quarterly, it cannot be the place where daily exceptions are resolved. The three lower bodies exist so that the quarterly meeting is free to do the work only it can do.

Governance decays quietly. The table stays the same while the behaviour behind it changes. Watch for the signs rather than waiting for the measure to fail.

The first sign is attendance. If the Ops Review keeps meeting but the Black Belt stops attending, the body still exists on paper and has lost a third of its membership in practice. The second sign is cadence drift. A weekly review that becomes fortnightly, then monthly, has quietly moved operational decisions into a slower lane.

The third sign is a chair who stops chairing. When the Process Owner delegates the Ops Review indefinitely, the decision right over process changes and resources starts travelling with the delegate, and nobody agreed to that.

The fourth sign is escalation without routing. Issues that should stop at the Daily Huddle start appearing in the Steering Committee agenda. That usually means the lower body is not deciding anything, so people go around it.

Re-run the tool every few months. If the counts no longer match reality, update the table or fix the behaviour. Do not leave the two out of step.

The most frequent error is a body with a mandate and no decision right. It meets, it reviews, it notes. The sample avoids this: all four bodies carry decision rights, from issue triage up to funding.

The second error is a missing or shared chair. The tool counts chairs for a reason. A body with two chairs has none in practice, because each assumes the other is preparing the agenda.

The third error is cadence that does not match the risk. A daily process with monthly oversight will drift for weeks before anyone sees it. The sample ladder runs daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, which gives you a short loop for execution and a long loop for strategy.

The fourth error is building governance around individuals rather than roles. The sample uses role labels such as Process Owner, AP Manager and Black Belt. When a person leaves, the structure still stands.

Be honest about what the Governance Structure tool does not do. It records intent. It does not observe behaviour. It cannot tell you whether the Ops Review actually met last week or whether the chair turned up.

It does not measure performance. The counts of four bodies, four chairs, four sets of decision rights and six roles describe the design of your governance, not the condition of your process. A complete table can sit above a process that is failing.

It does not validate authority. If you write funding as a decision right for the Steering Committee but the organisation requires approval elsewhere, the tool will still show four of four with decision rights. You have to confirm that the rights you wrote down are rights the business recognises.

It also does not tell you whether you have the right number of bodies. Four suits this fictional case. Your process may need two, or five. The tool reports what you entered and leaves the judgement to you.

Use it as the written agreement that survives the handover. Pair it with a control plan for the measures and a response plan for the triggers. Together they give the improvement somewhere to live once the project team has gone.