What is Project Governance?
Project governance is the oversight framework around a project: who approves what, how decisions above the PM's authority get made, gate structure, escalation paths, and how the project stays aligned with organizational strategy. It links the project to the sponsor, steering bodies, and enterprise policy.
Good governance is enabling — clear thresholds, fast decisions, one accountable sponsor. Bad governance is either theater (boards that rubber-stamp) or friction (five committees, no decision rights). The design goal fits one sentence: every decision has one home and a service-level.
Worked example
A refinery project's governance one-pager: PM decides within ±5% budget and 2 weeks float; sponsor decides to ±15%; steering committee beyond that, meeting monthly with 48-hour emergency sessions available. When a heat-exchanger failure demands a $3M fast decision, everyone already knows whose call it is and how fast it can happen. The crisis takes four days instead of five weeks — the governance was designed before it was needed.