The program has a biweekly steering committee, four weekly workstream syncs, a daily PMO standup, a monthly executive readout, and a quarterly board review. The people responsible for executing the program’s actual work are spending the majority of their time talking about the work instead of doing it. This is almost always a symptom of the same underlying problem: the organization has not defined who decides what.
How the Pattern Develops
Governance models tend to accumulate meetings over time rather than being designed deliberately. A dependency surfaces between two workstreams and nobody knows who has the authority to resolve it, so a coordination meeting gets created. The executive sponsor asks for more visibility, so a readout cadence gets added.
Each meeting solves a real problem in the moment. The issue is that the problem being solved is almost always the same one: nobody knows who has the authority to make a specific type of decision. When decision rights are unclear, the default response is to create a forum. Discussion forums feel productive because people are in the room and the topic is on the agenda, but discussion and decision are different activities, and most of these forums produce discussion without resolution.
The Cost Nobody Measures
The direct cost is visible: hours spent in rooms instead of doing execution work. A workstream lead in four hours of governance meetings per week has lost half a day of execution capacity. Multiply that across eight workstream leads and the program is losing thirty-two hours of execution capacity per week to governance overhead.
The indirect cost is harder to see. When governance consumes too much time, its quality degrades. People stop preparing because they have too many meetings to prepare for. Decisions get deferred because the meeting runs out of time, which means they surface again in the next meeting, reinforcing the perception that more meetings are needed.
The Root Cause: Unclear Decision Rights
Meetings are being used as a substitute for defined decision rights. A decision right specifies who has the authority to make a particular type of decision and what the escalation path is if they can’t resolve it.
When decision rights are clear, most decisions don’t require a meeting. The workstream lead who knows she has authority to rescope within her workstream boundary makes the call, documents it, and moves on. The program lead who knows that cross-workstream dependency conflicts go to the steering committee brings only those specific issues, not a general status update.
When decision rights are unclear, every decision becomes a group discussion. The workstream lead who doesn’t know whether she can rescope without approval brings it to the next sync. The program lead who doesn’t know which issues require steering committee input brings everything, because the cost of under-escalating is higher than the cost of over-escalating.
Decision Rights First, Meetings Second
The operating model design step starts with decision rights first, not meeting cadences. The team defines the categories of decisions the program will face:
- Scope changes within a workstream
- Cross-workstream dependency resolution
- Timeline changes
- Budget reallocation
- Vendor escalation
For each category, the team specifies who decides and when escalation is required.
Once decision rights are clear, the meeting structure becomes minimal. Meetings exist for two purposes: decisions that require multiple stakeholders to be present, and information sharing that can’t be accomplished asynchronously. Everything else happens through the decision rights framework.
A well-designed governance model for a cross-functional program with four to six workstreams typically requires a biweekly steering committee and a weekly program lead sync, with a monthly executive readout only when the program needs sponsor-level input. Workstream-level meetings are left to the workstream leads to design based on their own needs. This is what a lightest-weight governance model looks like in practice, and one team used this approach to cut meetings by forty percent.
The Test
The test for governance health is straightforward: can every person in the program answer “who decides this?” for any decision they’re likely to face in the next two weeks? If they can, the governance model is working. If they can’t, the organization will create meetings to fill the gap.
Designing decision rights takes one focused session. The meetings it prevents would have consumed hundreds of hours over the life of the program. When everyone can see this structure, it gives teams a shared reference for how decisions flow. For how to design the minimum viable operating model using this principle, see when the operating model outlives the program.
