Published 1 October 2026
Say "governance" in most agencies and people picture a steering committee: a monthly meeting full of senior people, a long deck, and very few decisions. It gets set up at kickoff, meets twice, and then quietly stops happening. So the word gets a bad name, and teams conclude that governance is something for large programmes with large budgets, not a twelve week build for a client with a forty person marketing team.
That's the wrong conclusion. Governance on a midsize project isn't a committee. It's three answers, written down before the work starts: who decides what, what happens when a decision gets stuck, and where everyone can see what's already been decided.
Most agency projects without explicit governance don't fail dramatically. They just get slower and more political. Decisions get made in whichever meeting the right people happened to attend. On the client side, the person approving designs isn't the person holding the budget. On the agency side, the account director agrees a date the delivery team hasn't seen yet.
Nothing is technically broken. Nobody knows whose call it is, so the same decision gets made twice (and differently), feedback arrives from someone nobody expected to hear from, and the PM's escalation route is chasing people on Slack until someone replies.
Governance on a midsize project is three things, not a committee.
1. Decision rights
For each type of decision on the project (scope, budget, design, technical approach, timeline), name one person on each side who can say yes. One person, not a group. "The client team approves designs" means nobody approves designs. This sits next to a RACI matrix, it doesn't replace it: a RACI covers who does the work, decision rights cover who makes the call.
2. An escalation path with a clock on it
When a decision is stuck, where does it go next, and how long does it wait at each level? The time limit is the part that matters. Without one, "we'll escalate it" just means "we'll wait longer and feel worse about it".
3. A decision log and a light cadence
A running list with four columns: date, decision, who made it, what it affects. Alongside it, a short recurring slot with the client sponsor for anything above the delivery team's authority. That slot is your steering committee. It just runs for thirty minutes with a three item agenda: decisions needed, risks above the line, budget position.
Take a fourteen week website and CMS rebuild, with an agency team of six. The whole governance setup fits on one page.
| Decision | Client | Agency |
|---|---|---|
| Scope and budget | Marketing director | Account director |
| Design approval | Brand manager | Creative lead |
| Technical approach | Head of digital | Tech lead |
| Timeline and resourcing | Project lead | Project manager |
Decision rights: one named person on each side, per decision type.
The escalation path. The time limit at each level is what makes it work.
On cadence, that's a weekly thirty minute delivery check in and a monthly thirty minute sponsor review. Nothing more.
Six weeks in, the brand manager asks for an extra microsite section during a design review. Without the table, that request gets discussed, half agreed, and quietly absorbed. With it, everyone in the room already knows it's a scope decision, so it goes to the marketing director and the account director, gets logged, and gets priced. Nobody has to be the bad guy.
Making it too big. A twenty page governance document is a filing exercise. If it doesn't fit on a page, it won't get used once the project is busy.
Naming groups instead of people. Every row in the decision rights table should have a name in it, not a team or a job family.
Writing it once and never pointing at it. Same problem as a scope statement. The value only shows up when someone contests a decision and the PM can point at the table instead of relying on memory or seniority.
Agreeing it internally only. Governance the agency wrote and the client never saw isn't governance. It's a wish list.
Draft the decision rights table and the escalation path before kickoff, so the client is reviewing it rather than negotiating it live. Walk through it at kickoff, straight after the scope statement, because the two belong together. Start the decision log on day one, even if the first entry is small. And book every sponsor review into calendars for the whole project in one go, so the cadence exists before anyone gets busy.
Governance isn't overhead for big programmes. On a midsize project, it's the one page that stops decisions being made by whoever happened to be in the room.
The RACI Matrix template is already in the PM Hub vault for the task side of this problem, and the full Governance & Role Clarity model is on the way. Want both, and the rest of the frameworks that make delivery less chaotic, as they ship?
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