Why Governance?

There are several reasons why a lean governance strategy is important for your organization’s success. Lean governance strives to ensure that:

1. Your organization’s investment is spent wisely. Organizations make investments in their people, in their infrastructure, and in their processes to enable them to better serve their customers (or in the case of government agencies, their citizens). From a financial point of view, your goals should be to regularly and consistently create real business value and to provide appropriate return on investment (ROI). To do this you must determine how you will execute your strategy by selecting and prioritizing the most valuable initiatives to undertake. You must also monitor these initiatives to ensure that they fulfill their promise, and if not then remediate them appropriately.
2. Your teams are empowered to carry out their work. An important aspect of lean governance is to ensure that people and teams have the authority to fulfill their responsibilities. Many agile transformations run into trouble when the roles and responsibilities of people are not agreed upon, or when they are they are not properly supported by senior management. Another important strategy is to empower teams to choose their own way of working (WoW), to self-determine how they will work together, enabling them to tailor their approach to meet the needs of the situation that they face.
3. People are motivated to work together effectively. There are two aspects to this. First, teams need to work effectively with their stakeholders. Second, teams also need to work effectively with their colleagues. To do this you must adopt processes and organizational structures that encourage people to collaborate together and to learn from one another.
4. Risks are monitored and mitigated at appropriate organizational levels. Although addressing risk at the team-level is a good start it isn’t sufficient from an organizational point of view. Many small risks that are acceptable individually can add up to a very large risk for your organization. For example, one team using a new technology platform is an experiment. Fifty teams adopting that new platform at the same time is a significant risk if the platform proves to be problematic. Someone must be looking at risks from a portfolio perspective and guide teams accordingly.
5. Your organizational ecosystem is sound. Your organization isn’t just a collection of teams. It is an ecosystem of teams working together, supported by culture, ways of working, organizational structures, and technologies. All aspects of your ecosystem need to be healthy for your organization to thrive.
6. Everyone works in an open and collaborative manner. There are several ways that the DA™ tool kit promotes this. First, work is performed in an agile manner that is inherently open and collaborative. Second, all teams should present accurate and timely information to their stakeholders. For example, enterprise architects can make their work available to everyone, as can your portfolio management team, your data management team, and so on. Third, everyone should be motivated to learn more about your organization, its strategy, its values, and how you intend to work together to achieve the outcomes you’ve set out for yourselves.
7. All of these things will continue to be true now and in the future. Lean governance balances your short-term and long-term needs. Too many organizations have allowed technical debt to grow in recent years, for the skills of their staff to stagnate, and to continue to tolerate traditional strategies that are well past their prime.

There are two fundamental reasons why individuals should be interested in lean governance:

1. You’re being governed, like it or not. Regardless of the size or your organization, the length of time it’s been in operation, or the sector(s) in which you work, someone is keeping an eye on and guiding your overall efforts.
2. You deserve to be governed effectively. Sadly, many governance strategies prove to be ineffective in practice due to application of traditional strategies and ways of thinking. 

• Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset
• Governance