While there often is a lot of ego involved in determining which individuals are supposed to act on an operational, tactical or strategic level in an organization, it makes sense to develop more objective measures and assist in determining who should do what – and whether the right people are placed at the right level of alignment. Based on these activities the positioning and the frequency of the governance levels follows fairly naturally.

Different activities

The basis of all organizations are the people doing the actual work, whether these are the laborers building an office, the bank employees helping the clients or the IT programmers coding the software. To coordinate these activities, whether that is done by a Project Manager, Scrum Master, Team Leader or a self-steering team, the Operational level takes responsibility for the planning of activities. When process descriptions and/or FTE budgets also come into play, a more Tactical viewpoint is needed. Whereas in smaller organizations often these functions are picked up by other levels, in larger organizations often this alignment is done at a separate, managerial level, where additionally the planning of people is being performed.

A typical Board in turn further facilitates the collaboration of people or departments and often uses organization charts to facilitate this. Participants ideally are capable of performing the activities at their level but also those of the more concrete levels ‘below’ them (they ‘know the industry’), or at least understand these so that they can communicate with the relevant representatives. The further away in the organization, the less knowledge of the underlying activities are needed at a Board-level. The table below gives a brief overview

Timing of Governance

The more abstract an activity becomes, the more time regularly is needed to perform these activities. Therefore, as a rule, the ‘more concrete’  a level, the more frequent alignment is needed. Another factor determining the governance is the degree of urgency. This level of urgency can be distinguished into ‘regular’, or when a change needs to be implemented ‘Project’ going all the way to a real crisis-mode. In the current Corona-crisis even the U.S. President engages in a daily press conference, in other countries a weekly update seems to be judged sufficient by their leaders. This frequency of meetings is one indication of how much control these leaders feel in this situation. Below an overview of some regular meeting intervals.

Application

When determining the governance structure of a project, cooperation, division or department it often is helpful to assess what topics need to be discussed and how much urgency plays a role. As soon as there is consensus on these topics, the relevant personnel decision becomes more obvious this way.