Benefits of keeping governance and delivery functions together

Over the weekend, one of my ex-colleague reached out to me seeking advice on an org design question – should you keep  governance and best practices functions within a delivery organization?

My take: You can either keep governance functions within your best delivery unit or create a separate governance organization but it won’t be successful without assigning it some critical delivery responsibilities.

 

Here’s an example of what has worked in my professional experience:

At Medco, while running the BPM COE, I was tasked with creating a structure that could parallelize development. We had a massive transformation project, with a scale up target of almost 1000 developers at peak.

We had applications for various products – like mail order dispensing, point of sale adjudications, specialty pharmacy etc. These applications included common workflow capabilities like order processing, customer advocacy, therapeutic resource centers etc. These we chose to implement as frameworks. There were multiple scrum teams working on parallel development. We created a governance group – the Corporate Agile COE that was responsible for orchestrating application delivery across these framework dev groups (COE’s) and the application work station groups (BIACs).  In addition to governance, this group also had some critical enterprise framework delivery responsibilities like authentication and authorization, PHI data access controls, single sign on, personalization framework, and service bus client-server framework.

While governance is a full time job, without delivery responsibilities, it does not carry enough creds to be effective.

Why?

Architecture and Governance should not become an “Ivory Tower”: It needs to be grounded, practical and implementable; Incentives are aligned between delivery and governance, so governance principles are light, not onerous and implementable. And the best way to prove that a design is implementable is to give the person/team proposing it a chance to implement it using the same guidance; The aim for both architecture and governance should be to be simple, rational, elegant and not onerous so as to impact delivery.

Eat your own dog food – hence establish credibility when prescribing your solution: The group prescribing architecture principles is able to demonstrate through their own delivery that it works, hence establishing credibility when prescribing solutions.

Architecture not a scape goat for delivery: Other delivery groups cannot claim that the architecture is unimplementable and thus make the arch and governance group a scapegoat for failed deliveries.