 Well thank you everyone for coming along, today's session here presenting is debunking the myths of digital governance. I'm Morgan Richings, I'm the Senior Program Manager at Acquia. Just a bit of a introduction and welcome as we run through the agenda. So today I'll be covering off what is digital governance, is digital governance actually needed, case study of who needs digital governance and what digital governance can actually do for you. So a lot about digital governance. Before we get to that, a little bit about myself. My name is Morgan Richings, as I mentioned. I have 15 years working on different digital focused roles. Currently I work for Acquia. My role as a Senior Program Manager is a mix of many different things. I think like everyone's roles these days. A bit of project management, a business analyst and also a camp manager to my clients. So where do I come from? I come from Canberra, Australia. Please don't laugh. Though I think a few of my friends in Hobart probably get the same stick that everyone else does, everyone else gives from around the world. So Canberra itself is known for the balloon spectacular. Once a year from about a week balloons ago, no actually it's known for Parliament House and the politicians that are there. So I'd like to think the balloon spectacular actually does take that focus. Here we are. So what motivates me? My family, of course. This is a picture of us up at Lake Indivine just a few hours up from Canberra. Besides that, what motivates me at work? I am passionate about the change management processes behind best practice web content management system implementations. I am weird like that. There's plenty of devs out there outside today that will talk about different technologies and things like that. I love process. Who here loves process? Hands up. Yes! Yes! My friends, my friends. The other thing I like is building better collaborative partnerships within teams. So as a vendor working with our clients, the motivation I have is to actually achieve the most valuable outputs with the resources that we collectively have available. We walk in the door with a budget, a timeline, a set of scope that needs to be achieved. So how can we actually deliver upon that and deliver upon that as much as we can. And one thing I like to talk about is going beyond on time, on budget as expected. So if you can get to that point of going beyond that, we can actually get to the really cool stuff which everyone wants to work on besides potentially just the very boring state things that project might be, actually project goals that might be there in the first place. Why am I talking about all these things? Because good digital governance helps to deliver those goals and ideas I've talked about above. So what actually is digital governance? Let's start with, before we throw the buzzword digital into it, let's talk about governance. So governance is a decision-making framework which defines the people, the processes, and the technologies used to support your organization. So we'll have jobs, we'll have things to do, and we have the technologies that ultimately deliver upon those goals that we try to achieve. So digital governance is a critical framework and process for managing a successful digital presence. So your organization's digital presence, whether that's a kiosk, whether that's an intranet, whether that's a website or multiple websites, or AR, or potentially Google assistance or whatever the hell that thing actually is, it's more than just writing good code. Good code is really, really helpful, it's really, really important, but there's more to it than just that. So a well-designed digital governance framework will minimize the number of ongoing technical debates required for managing your organization's digital presence. So part of this is why have a digital governance plan? You want to be in a situation where good code can be delivered, good efficiency can be gained, and there are some things that if you actually set a plan in place in the first place, you can avoid dealing with those issues and debates and discussions as you go throughout the actual delivery of your project or ongoing business as usual. So we're here to debunk the myths of digital governance, and the first question opposed to everyone here, is this a truth or a myth? I've completed a rock-solid governance plan document. It'll address all my digital governance issues. So hands up who thinks this is a myth? Hands up who thinks this is a truth? Come on! Someone, anyone? All right, fine. So Jeremy, why would you think it's a myth? Yep. So with that in mind, your work is never done. Your plan is a great start. Communicating that plan, seeking further information, further feedback, actually improving the effectiveness and actually testing that plan throughout the life of your project is an important essential thing to do. So yes, definitely a myth. And the point here is it is ultimately a simple plan to start off with. So everyone can tick off the scorecard. You've got one for one so far. So once again, what is digital governance? It makes clear who has the decision to make an authority in these areas. Digital strategy. What's your organization's approach to using the Internet and the World Wide Web? Why are we here? What are they intending to do? Your digital policy, what your organization must and must not do online. Ultimately, there are guidelines that guide what we do. We can't just do whatever the hell we want to. And having some full policy plan in the first place will help provide that guidance. And digital standards. What is the nature of your organization's digital portfolio? So think DTA and other organizations like that providing those stands for you but also what is it about your organization that is actually unique? So digital governance is most effective in larger, more distributed organizations. So if you are one person and you look after everything, setting out a plan, a digital governance plan for you and yourself and how you guide your own self, it's probably less effective. We're talking about organizations that multiple cities, multiple time zones, multiple languages, multiple everything, different cultures across the world. This is where having those digital governance plans actually will help assist and guide you and how you work within your organization and the work that you do. So it's most effective in being able to actually assign ownership and confirm delegation. The priorities of why you are here and what you are doing. And defining the guideline stands as well as training resources to deliver upon that vision. So some components now, I have to admit these are actually only three of about probably 18 I could rattle off. But we'll focus here on content editorial workflow, digital governance, branding and visual assets and technical governance as we go through. This is definitely not a definitive list and I'm sure you can think of some of yourselves but we only have limited time for the session as it is. So content editorial governance, content governance establishes standards for how your organization communicates with its audience in an engaging and persuasive manner across channels. So as I said before, you might have kiosks, you might have a website, a web app, progressive web app, a name, all your different omnichannel opportunities and each of those will have their own content editorial guidelines associated, hence having a plan to actually guide that. Brand governance ensures consistency across your brand promise of your organization. Consistency is critical as it drives awareness, engagement, retention and loyalty for your customers. So technical governance. Now I have to concede that this presentation actually worked with two of my colleagues from Europe, Graham and Verna. I've stolen some of his technical slides and cut those down. So please don't come after this presentation and ask me more details about code governance, security governance, domain and platform governance because I only have a very satellite view of that. But here we are again. Truth or myth? A good digital plan is a strict set of standards or design rules to enforce co-workers and distributed teams in doing exactly what you want. Who thinks this is truth? Hands up. Who thinks this is a myth? Who doesn't know? Come on Jeremy. So why Chris, would you think this is a myth? So definitely a myth. It's kind of the big stick authority view. So this approach, if you do run with it, treats individuals as risk factors. The people that are employed do jobs and do jobs well. You're actually treating them as a problem that needs to be addressed. Looking to suppress unwanted behavior and that's going against the idea of actually building a supportive environment. They actually trust the people that you've employed, ideally vetted and there's a reason why they're here and ideally you're actually empowering your team so they can focus on delivering. So once again a digital governance plan can help support this approach. So autonomy not authority. So it doesn't have to be viewed as an enforcement of authority over developers and contributors. Good governance enables autonomy to find the best and most elegant solutions using the most appropriate tools. But I guess the key thing here is that people need to actually know what the standards are to be able to comply with them. It's not to say that you can't have healthy debates about how to approach things and potentially contrary to the guidelines itself. But say of an environment where you're actually debating the issues as opposed to individuals or coming from a situation of your own personal kind of biases and things like that. So is digital governance needed? Hands up who thinks digital governance is not needed? Who thinks it is actually needed? Cool. Hopefully, well actually I think it's pretty much consensus. So if you do see something here that you don't necessarily agree with I'm actually keen to hear your thoughts as we go through. We'll have a Q&A towards the end of the presentation anyway so feel free to take some notes and go from there. So truth or myth digital governance is easy. I'll look up digital governance frameworks on Wikipedia. Copy, paste and my job is done. Who doesn't think this is a myth? Very good. One dissenting view. I think maybe at this point in time you've kind of got the answer to these things. It is another myth that it's easy. So the key thing about this myth is that you can look at frameworks. You can look at out-of-the-box kind of and you can even buy out-of-the-box frameworks and governance plans and things like that. The key thing here though is that every organization is different. Genuinely different. The people that make that up, the processes, the goals, etc. They are different. The culture of your organization will actually influence those behaviors and how successful a pre-existing digital governance plan could be. But the key thing about this is that what you bring to your organization is sorry what you bring to a governance plan is your understanding of your organization and how it works. So I guess the general advice is if you do go or you have somebody come along and says we've got a digital governance plan for you unless they work for your organization unless they've lived and breathed that experience it's only effectively a guide as to what you should achieve. So once again one of the earlier myths talking about testing and validating those guidelines that you have in place this is kind of reinforcing that as well. Your organization is unique as much as it could be very similar to other places you've worked with before. So do we need digital governance? Everyone in the audience is saying yes and I agree. So in the end most organizations are facing challenges around budget, times, resourcing, availability, all of those good things that we all deal with on a daily basis. And that limited pool of resources I need to actually support those priorities. So where do we start? Well the goals were how are we effectively agreeing to deliver upon these things when we all have those situations where there's enough people, time, etc. And these guidelines can actually help provide that guidance in how these things can be achieved. So a clear plan for your enterprise and your organization. And at the same time a solid digital governance framework enables organizations to manage and mitigate those challenges successfully. So these are some typical digital governance challenges that we've identified and I guess our organization deals with on a fairly regular basis. Broken down by organizational delivery and brand challenges. I'll give you guys a couple of seconds to read through those. One, two, three, four, eight and ten. Of those described up there, who would have only hit maybe one or two of those hands up? All right, let's go three, only about three or four of these issues. Let's step a little bit higher. Maybe who's probably hit around about 80% of those issues in your organization or 100% of those issues and I think everyone's got their hands up as it is. So these are challenges which everyone has to deal with and I guess that's where I talked about every organization is unique. These challenges in themselves are not unique. If they're not unique, if they're understood, if people are dealing with these then ideally there are some form of governance or way to actually manage these things on an ongoing basis. If you identify the problem you can discuss it, you can try to identify it, you can try and find ways to change that within your organization or even within your team as an opportunity. So talked about the challenges but some of the digital governance objectives that we're trying to achieve. So established clear roles and responsibility, definition of purpose, digital presence. What is that minimum viable product you're trying to achieve? What is the goal that you're trying to go for? The desired capabilities. Determining where flexibility is necessary and where it should be removed. So giving people the opportunity to do things but at the same time flexibility itself and customization can become a problem. Enabling shared ownership and coordination. Enabling efficient evaluation of priorities and continually connect execution, strategy, vision and goals. Two I want to pull out though here is these. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities. Enabling shared ownership and coordination. Can you both establish clear roles and responsibility if it's a shared ownership of that? Can you? That's a question I guess I'm putting out to the audience here. Who actually believes that you can have both a shared responsibility but clear roles and responsibilities? Cool. And I'll pick on Jeremy again. How would you achieve that in that sense? I mean do you see the challenge I guess I'm alluding to in that? So I guess responsibility is a sign but at the same time there's a shared kind of ownership and delivery, a team-based approach to actually achieve that. Is it kind of? Yeah. Okay. Cool. I struggle with this one myself. So it's something that I naturally gravitate towards. Who's responsible for this? Is it Jeremy? Is it who is that person? But ultimately it's not a group of individuals. It ultimately is a team in itself. And so there needs to be that support and the governance around that. So it's something I struggle with myself on a regular basis. But just wanted to call that one out as we as we went through. So once again digital framework outputs, things that you were actually producing as part of a digital governance plan. A charter, defining customer experiences goals and how the platform supports those goals. Establishing the governance around teams, data management, processes, risk management. And once again the concept here is that as you're establishing these things you're constantly reviewing them, testing them, validating them and revising them as required throughout that time. Now this is the really exciting part. Well I get really excited about this. Who needs digital governance or ultimately what can actually go wrong without digital governance? So I guess it's some airing of dirty laundry, which everyone, I know I certainly enjoy hearing these things in these presentations. So truth or myth, governance is a lot of people talking. We only ever get in the way and slow me down from doing real work. I think you can all guess it's a myth or I'm going to say it's a myth. Hands up who's come across people with this kind of viewpoint around governance or other kind of I guess planning practices and things like that. Cool. And what I guess when you're in that situation and enthusiastically put your hand up. So we'll go to you sir. How do you deal with that yourself? How do you respond to that situation or that suggestion? Yeah. And so I guess the myth is as long as lines I don't need digital governance. And the concept there is yes. It's not that the idea behind it is actually have resilience to handle stresses or eventually accumulate in the absence of effective decision making processes a bit wordy. But in the end I guess the when things are going well, things are going well. There's no problems. You can do it your own way and there's no issues and there's no hazards. But in the end what I guess I see is digital governance, the benefit around that is building that resilience. So when you do hit situations that aren't expected, there are problems, there are issues. How will that be dealt with? And you know we can all live in hope and we can all live in optimism. But in the end these things will come up. But I guess along the lines of what you described, if you kind of I guess it's viewed as a set of rules and regulations and kind of that authoritative thing that we talked about before, it can I guess put people off. One thing I don't really talk about directly in this presentation but it's around I guess the subtlety of trying to actually inject digital governance into your organization. I think that's kind of what you're touching on as well which I don't address here but I'm keen to have a chat with anyone after this presentation about that point as well. So say the scene, what could possibly go wrong? So this is I guess the background as to a potential project which I may or may not have worked on or was aware of. And so large multinational company consulting multiple, multiple, multiple websites across multiple regions, multiple languages, multiple everything on a single web platform using the Aqueous site cloud factory platform. What's a platform there? So what was the circumstances? A three-month project, Intel team with multiple vendors involved the design, website build, testing everything, progressive timelines for go live type but who's worked on a project like this before? Yeah yeah they're always fun aren't they? Define scope versus agile delivery, no one no one cares about digital governance thinking your concepts let's just make it happen. And at the same time why not let's do digital transformation of the internal business to achieve even greater things and somehow those efficiencies are going to make everything work great. So what did go wrong? I think you guys probably guessed all these prelocation of funds, time overrun, lots of conflict, inability to make decisions, bad focus and deliverables being done that simply made no sense. So what are they calling out some of the major issues and before I get hypnotized and stop we're going to move on from this but effectively the work may be perpetually in progress. So one kind of key example of the issues were happening was we had a visual design process that was allowed to continue whilst previous sprints remain open with show stopping issues. The catchcry was we can't stop to discuss our problems because we have a tight deadline which makes absolutely no sense but it was very important to not talk about these things. So no approvals meant no work was ever actually completed. Sprints kept going but problems kept accumulating. Project management had no idea what the hell was going on because there was no reflection back as to what was going on or visibility of that. The executive had absolutely no idea what was going on and then in turn because of the multiple vendor relationships the next vendor in line to start on ex-state simply couldn't be briefed in to actually start their work. So things grinded to an absolute halt. So lessons learned from this were introducing a process be ready to compromise and face with new challenges be agile the dream that is sold but at the same time regularly evaluate the impact of those compromises. If you are going to compromise in a process you should factor in stopping to reevaluate that but the key thing here is if you don't actually stop if you don't actually evaluate these things this becomes a new normal. So you think about I guess if all of a sudden it's all very very stressful you've decided to compromise in a particular approach and run with that if that isn't being I guess made visible and available to your management your colleagues etc you've effectively created the new de facto process. So if there's a process to find or one undefined you've actually created it by doing what you're doing. The problem is you simply have no support from your organization so you are effectively going alone and nobody wants that. Another issue multiple partners with competing approaches. So once again multiple vendors involved in this project the concept was the client had brought in the experts so let's lead them to do what they do best what could possibly go wrong. Misalignment between expectations of every partner everyone had different viewers to what was to be achieved how it could be done what should be done who was doing what was part of the problem lots of rework lots of unplanned meetings and lost efficiency budget burned. So lessons learned or things that should have been done having a clear responsibility of roles and roles the roles and responsibilities between you and your partners. You've got these partners so why not actually involve those partners in developing your frameworks critiquing your frameworks if you've got a wonderful plan in place don't simply wake them over the head with us as they walk in the door ask them about it collaborate with them help them to review help them to actually help them to help you improve upon that base based on their experience and their their understanding and ultimately working together to align those competing visions to achieve a broader benefit to the overall program and work that you're doing. So the next kind of major area that to call out was who owns a scope and what actually is that scope. So part of the problem once again with this wonderful project was we're running an agile delivery process and ultimately you need a prioritized backlog of work to be done you have a product owner they're meant to be guiding and actually and actually delivering helping to live that vision for the project itself. The problem was that this was this backlog never actually stayed still constant reprioritization depending on which executive sponsor rocked up and had a look at the project at the time. So you start to engage the partners are starting to be engaged by the the project itself they'd start their work then all of a sudden in an agile things would shift because this particular executive has walked in the door and that priority is now picked up. Who's worked on that project anyone anyone everyone who hasn't worked on that project I think probably all have. So it was the impact there was a vision I mean that was the good thing there was a vision for the project but there simply was no consensus in being able to actually deliver upon and translate those priorities and what was the most valuable thing we worked on. Usual story budget time burnt as things were changed again and again and again. So one point I keep saying I think if anyone has ever talked to me about talking talk to me about agile being only one product owner is an essential thing. By having that product owner jumping to the whims of multiple different stakeholders there weren't really one product owner they'd effectively remove their responsibility and pass it back up to multiple managers fighting over that responsibility. In the end I think the problem was the classic one of the product owner wasn't delegated that authority the reason why they were flipping and flopping back and forth was because they simply didn't have the real authority to actually deliver upon the vision that the organization had set forth. At the same time a program roadmap that actually underpins that is a great guideline for that product owner and their executive by having that roadmap in place they can all point at that and they can all look at that. And when someone comes across and says I want to spend my time I think you should really put the the headshot of the CEO on the front page of the website. You can look at that roadmap and you can say where is on the roadmap that's an important thing is this purely vanity project for that for that CEO yes it probably is well hey let's not do that that doesn't make any sense. So ultimately where did this project get to? It was a reset with a positive project outcome which is a nice story to have. In the end once again a lot of optimism a lot of hope but very very little digital governance and so in the end what was decided was with a lot of pain and decision-making and discussions and multiple meetings again and again the project went on hold based on the the the budget being burnt the time being wasted we were able to get to a situation where explain that making even more poor decisions based on a timeline which in the end did not need to hold wasn't going to be beneficial for anybody the partners the client the budget the stakeholders there was no benefit in that process. So at the same time went by putting on hold the outstanding issues around design scope delegation vendor relations could be resolved by giving it that space we went through the process of actually establishing that governance framework to support that decision-making processes as well as bringing all the partners into the room to actually have a conversation so that dictatorial kind of approach that was being put in place you go live established and was met at the same time civil time being established for that. So what digital governance can do for you? Digital governance is once again decision-making framework which defines the people the processes the technologies used to support a digital marketing organization provide clarity on your roles and responsibilities within your work and is most needed for when organizations are distributed and have competing priorities. What can do for your organization strategy and ownership establish roles responsibilities clear ownership and clear lines of communication develop a decision-making model so that goals can be prioritized and communicated across the enterprise itself improve corporate culture etc etc define those policies and standards standards all these things I'm talking about here hands up who thinks their organization has actually got this down pat partway there yeah and I guess the thing is that do find that digital governance is and I think it's having a brief conversation with someone from a water authority based out of Melbourne that these are things that people talk about a lot but don't don't necessarily deliver upon well one of the things is that I find that executive are less interested in gauge with working with digital governance once again that viewpoint around and that myth around it being a lot of talking with little value at the same time the issues around actually selling digital governance within organizations itself is one of the hardest possible things because you have and I guess probably every single person seeing in this room has likely an interest in digital governance has experience with and also experience poor outcomes within projects itself I guess the thing is that we can talk a lot about digital governance but without actually having that I guess implemented and working throughout your organization there's less benefit of that and so I guess the I don't necessarily cover in this presentation but once again how to actually get digital governance thinking introduced within organizations is a big struggle as it is and I guess the other thing here is that I'm keen to actually ask you guys in the audience as to what has been a strategy that's worked well within your organizations that has actually delivered upon digital governance or at least partway through that approach so hands up who has I guess talked about these things within their organization met some hesitation but has been able to actually overcome that within your organization and I guess if no one puts their hands up it means that no one has actually ever succeeded in getting anything through in this place Jeremy what have you got what have you hit a lot of time educating our clients in these sort of things which is often difficult and especially as you're changing quite regularly so yeah sometimes you're yeah put all this effort in and then you have to do that all over again but our producers and project managers are very comfortable by doing this so often that it's becoming kind of second nature so our first step is ingraining the so do you find yourself educating clients as to how to work through these types of things is that kind of yeah what the activity is yeah because often it's all new to them they they have no idea so yeah seeing as we've done it so regularly it's a lot more comfortable for us to get them into this mindset and that makes our life much easier going forward because you're avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that you yeah and so do you find I mean is agile helped in that respect or is it kind of made things harder or yeah agile is great a waterfall budget so obviously everyone would love to work agile with yeah all the money in the world the thing I was alluding to there around agile is that we do find a lot of projects start that haven't actually had the planning in place in front of them it's kind of the the extreme opposite of waterfall where people will spend you know years and years and years potentially briefing a project which in the end by the time it starts of course the requirements are so out of date irrelevant as it is but the other extreme is no thought around actually having frameworks to actually support a project going forward actually gets done and so I guess the experience that we have is that that education of clients when we come on on board a lot of that I guess the first couple weeks is actually trying to establish these things test and validate had these have these types of governance things been established and I guess the thing that we're always looking for is you know I can go through these slides as to I guess what the benefits are but trying to find that hook within an organization itself to actually get that motivation that interest and actually enact that change is I guess part of the goals of my role and the style of project as it is and so trying to find those angles and I guess part of the reason for us in the audience is trying to take some extra notes down myself as to how that has been achieved and I guess from a client side perspective I guess more internal team perspective hands up who is on more usually on the client side working with outside vendors cool I mean the flip side of that situation I mean hands up who I guess have had vendors come in the door to actually try and start a process have you had governance models in places has it worked well with having a vendor coming in to actually help establish those those practices within your organization how do you find that situation I guess had some hands up here if don't get a volunteer I'm going to pick someone out who looks friendly and smiley there's a friendly smiley person right there usually comes into play with us with of course the bigger clients again which comes down to again the amount of money in the pot that we can afford to spend in like part of the project management for us to sort of set all these processes up so a lot of our smaller clients this is where I hope I based a lot of our client portfolio is the smaller client and while we try and set up a lot of these parameters on a project level again depending on the size of the project of revisiting over and over again throughout the process sometimes just doesn't happen just because we're trying to get the job done we've got to just a finite amount of hours I know that goes against the agile concept but a lot of our clients here are working to a finite budget so while we try and lay out all these parameters and work out who's doing what again like everything that you've stated previously yeah we only really fulfill any of this with the larger whether it's a government department or larger private clients yeah yeah I mean I guess part of that is what we try and put forward and we kind of move to Q&A so I guess if you haven't got any questions feel free to put your hands up in given there but on that point I guess the having actually having checkpoints in place predefined for a project even before you start I find is being really essential because when things are going well you know everyone's happy just to not really worry about these things but at the same time it's quite easy to dilute yourself and thinking that everything is going well until a week before launch then oh my gosh what's happened everything's falling to pieces so actually establishing those kind of checkpoints throughout the project itself to kind of reassess those plans yeah yeah of course of course yeah yeah if you can't if you can't actually even find your product only because they're on three thousand other different things at once they should sit down even talk to you because there are they are a three person band and yeah it's it's quite difficult so like a lot of these seminars being great just listening to to the great talks like someone yourself is giving but again being such a small business we have a lot of hats to wear in our organization and so where a lot of the large businesses that have been giving these seminars have individual operators within the company that can focus on these areas sometimes we're we're running around doing so many different things that again things get left a little bit sometimes in a project where we're trying to cover off another areas of the project so have you solved that problem yet on a on a pro yeah i'm not constantly weekly basis yeah yeah so any other questions otherwise i'll start posing questions back to the audience jeremy you had a question actually actually sorry jeremy spoke enough uh sorry you had a question question down the back there have fun to running around i think sorry question down this way or is that more of a scratch to the face we can we go back to jeremy as it is sorry oh come on jeremy yeah i just sort of maybe this is more of a question and answer is something that we're going through at the moment is we're putting together uh full project methodology so um from uh pitch through to proposal through to every step and we also have sort of managed services so it's sort of even offboarding that project into the usual um and as part of that we've kind of just did some really deep brainstorming sessions to try and come up with every thing we're possibly going to need to address and we've kind of made our own uh handbook on this idea with the project so in sort of your case you're wearing many hats um and sort of have to think about sort of lots of things if you're constantly be able to uh maybe once a week look in this booklet and go we're at this phase of the project or at this week i should be sort of talking about these things and sort of have you have you had a chance to test that out i mean you mentioned is that that's a recent thing as such that methodology approach yeah we've kind of just done a few chapters so far okay so kind of really the start and the end so we're currently working our way through the middle but it's been really successful with um making sure all of our projects start off consistently these days and we've got all of our requirements and we don't get halfway through and you're going oh we're kind of missing this important thing which we just asked the question at the start we would have had that and so and i guess my my natural version is uh to methodology not necessarily to the methodologies but i guess the the the volume actually is and i guess time spent against that because i guess thinking agile from a methodology perspective that these things need to evolve as well and i guess the fact that's a newer thing i'll be keen to ask you i guess in six months time as to how that actually is progressing and how much change has actually been put back into that as it is um because i think the part of the old kind of project management concept PMO concept was define the process that's the process do the process do that and everything will be perfect um and the reality is uh when you hit the ground running um that's not necessarily going to be the case we talked about the compromises that you need to make um at the same time be able to communicate those back up so i guess it's being able to have that methodology but also keeping that conversation open to critique as such so and you guys are great so i'm sure they keep doing that as well so yeah you're never going to solve all the problems um and i guess the key is just to make sure that you're not missing stuff which and especially when you're sort of onboarding new staff project managers you're able to put them you know this is how we do things and they're starting off in the right place with a really good knowledge of how to deal with projects cool thank you any other questions chris um my question is just uh briefly about um governance um we sort of uh i suppose when you're do you ever see a situation where you should compromise on governance in any way so uh i've worked in uh teams where often you're under staffed and so forth and often governance is switching very very quickly it's almost like once you're set in one team you're you're about to deliver on a project and then it's a new manager and so forth with a whole new set of goals and objectives and so forth and often it feels that i kind of feel that if you want to um ship a project before moving on to a new set of goals i suppose uh you kind of have to compromise on some of the particulars when it comes to a strategy or something like this so um do you have any experience there in terms of when to compromise and uh and when to go back to the plan well i guess it's it's compromised for the right reasons is the usual thing it's it's have that um actually have that conversation um about why you are compromising and what the benefit actually is um i mean talked a little bit earlier about the whole defacto process being established if you don't even talk about it like you can't escape that reality it's just you know actually talking about it um so in the end um in the end uh yes that compromise can make sense but do it in a visible fashion do it in a way that um do it in a way that actually does um i guess start it test it and make sure it works um is the key thing around that so hopefully that helps do it for the right reasons not the wrong reasons um and have you had an experience of that i suppose working um well um i guess uh i uh i have my own natural version to um i said methodologies are stuck in stone um and i guess the probably the best examples are that um i may or may not actually um adhere to all parts of our own methodologies within our projects but when i do that um i've got to have a really really good reason um to be doing that um ideally communicating that reason um but also being responsible for making that decision so yes in the end you are if you think that you have a better way of doing something you're taking on that responsibility yourself so you're going to know you're doing it right you've got to make sure you uh i guess if you're going to fail with that fail very quickly so you can revert back um but you're ultimately taking responsibility for that action itself if you can't convince of course your superiors and things like that so i guess that's the the dangerous part of it um but at the same time you are closest to the ground so you're likely going to be able to experience um you have that experience you have that knowledge and you can make that decision possibly more i guess more accurately than someone else a little bit further up so yeah um yes a little bit dangerous though a little bit dangerous so and i think we're actually at time so thank you very much