Energetic patience, absent presence: hints and tips for Steering Groups

You have an awesome team in place, an idea of what the project is, and you’re starting on the long road to deliver. What’s the best way to keep the project heading in the right direction, on time, on budget, widely supported and, you know, impactful? Here are some hints and tips on ‘Steering’ a project, and also I have quoted from the Museum Victoria Exhibition Development guide I redrafted in 2015. Also worth noting, in a small project, in an organisation of fewer than 30 or so people, most of this is completely over the top.

I think about it like this. If the project is easy, the project team and environment are perfect and no decisions are going to be required, then you don’t need a steering group. Good luck getting this dream project! Back in the real world…

The Steering Group exists to enable the Project Leader

The most important person is the project leader. Sometimes call a producer, sometimes a project manager, sometimes an architect, sometimes a curator. They have direct hands-on day to day responsibility to get this thing done, with control of budget, schedule, quality, risk, stakeholder management. The Steering Group (SG) exists for one reason only: to make their path smooth. It oversees the delivery of the project, within delegations set by Law / Board / Executive, and the applicable policies and procedures.

Hold Project Leader to account
Support Project Leader and team
Clear barriers
Advocate widely
Actively manage issues related to cost, schedule, quality, risk, stakeholder communications and organisational integration, including taking decisions within their spheres of control and delegations.

I cannot emphasise enough how their role is to enable, enhance and maximise creativity in the team — not to be The Creatives. A small, nimble project team working with a clear vision will deliver. They can be supported and enabled through design workshops, coffee conversations, inspiring outsiders. Not by a monthly meeting segueing into ‘but what if it was blue…?’

Does the project have a Creative Director? Often, a CEO will act in this role. This simply means that a creative forum is needed to exercise that directly with the project team. Don’t cross-pollinate with the Steering Group. Similarly, don’t let the single issue Finance Manager / CFO railroad the Steering Group, but work out a way that these issues are managed by the project lead in consultation. The SG must operate within the ‘iron triangle’ of Quality, Time and Budget. Any time that group becomes over-focused on any one of these it forces an imbalance, which leads to friction and wasted effort. I’ve seen ‘Creative’ SGs dump all the budget concerns onto a Project Manager and vice versa.

The Steering Group is not the Project Leader’s “boss”

The Project Leader has a line manager, to whom they’ll go to get contracts signed and so on. Th is is usually also the Chair of the SG but doesn’t have to be. Agree upfront what the accountabilities are. I managed the Producers at Museums Victoria and chaired exhibition SGs. I handled budget integration across the department as a line manager. I handled the project budget at the Steering Group.

The Steering Group is not a ‘Control Group’

So frequent in government museum projects in Australia. The focus usually becomes time, budget and risk, and they become a hurdle to be overcome, or a problem to be managed. In short, in opposition to the needs of the team. It works, in that the project gets done on time and under budget. But this auditing attitude is the anti-Kondo, it contains no joy, beauty or surprise.

A Control Group may be necessary but never act as though they are a Steering Group. You’ll need a Steering Group as well, bringing clarity at a level beyond a once-a-month focused on procurement, risk and politics.

Attitudes and skills

Governing is different from other roles in the workplace: it demands different behaviours. It is a significant responsibility, as these roles have the power to undermine the project. The key difference is that SG members act in service of the project, not their department or the whole of the organisation. If any tensions emerge between these, then a discussion with Executive is necessary. Again, from Museum Victoria’s guide:

A focus on the needs of the project, not the individual needs of a department or division, nor on the entirety of [the museum]
Deep understanding of how the project’s outcomes and benefits deliver the Strategic Vision of [the museum]
Transparency in communication
Timely, clear, communicated and owned decision-making
A collaborative mindset, respectful of different skills, expertise, experience and working styles
A focus on management information, while being mindful of stakeholder emotion and perception
A blend of pragmatism and idealism
An investment of sufficient time and focus
An understanding of the policy frameworks governing project delivery
Respect for the challenges of project delivery by the project team, and the balance between the different roles played

I would also add, a lack of panic. Holding nerve, displaying total support for the project team when challenges rear up, is essential. For that, every new ‘crisis’ must be met with equanimity. A panicking Steering Group is worse than a nervous CEO.

It’s pretty helpful to do a Steering Group and Team workshop to kick off the project, covering lots of things but the one id cite here is a matrix of expectations, which might look something like this…

Who’s on the Steering Group?

Keep it SMALL. No more than 5 people. Any more than that and just sharing opinions takes an hour entire meeting. Identify the biggest challenges and success factors the project will face. Bring the people who hold those accountabilities inside the Group. For the Children’s Gallery at Museums Victoria, the Steering Group was three. I chaired it as Head Exhibitions, and we had the Head of Learning and Museum Manager roles. Even though the project bid lots of building, Facilities were a consultee and reference specialist. They were not on the Steering Group. In the year before launch, Head of Brand/Marketing and Head of Production were brought into the group, as these issues came to the fore.

I have been in organisations where an SG could be made up of ‘the managers of the project team’ and can get up to 7 or 8 people. This is ridiculous and will hinder more than it helps. This means the corporate body is not working to clearly prioritise resources for the project. An SG created to manage a resource bunfight is an abrogation of responsibilities by the Executive/CEO.

It can be hard to say ‘you are my peer and I value your expertise, but you are not required on this steering group’ — but it is in the interests of the organisation so bite that bullet.

In an ideal world, if you have choices: ensure there’s a sceptic, a detail nazi, a humane carer who puts people over progress, and someone regularly overcome with a sense urgency. You will need all four. (Edit: Katrina Nitschke commented “How about an optimist to stretch the boundaries and balance the sceptic? Or is that a role for the creatives?” – I’d say Yes and/or yes!)

Make time for these people form as a team. Have lunch. Use the same time of day and meeting room where possible. Regularity is your friend here, ensuring mental energy is focused on supporting the project leader.

What do they do?

There are three types of activity.

1. action
2. insight
3. brokering alignment with activities above and beside the project

I prefer to hold the first two on alternating fortnights but some like to split the meeting half/half (either way, SG are then committed for 2hrs per month to this governance activity).

Action meeting
Receive briefings from the Project Leader. Advise. Act. That’s all. Like this:

• Meeting -2d; distribute dashboard report
• Meeting; review dashboard. Discuss any concerns it raises. Reflect and strategise. Confirm the necessary actions.
• Meeting +1d; distribute action list

The whole meeting should be run from 2 documents: a dashboard report and an action list. The SG members are bringing their expertise and situational power, and their networked insight and advocacy. CEO having concerns about a partnership? Discuss. Investigate. Resolve. Tricky issue with a part of the design? Talk it through, and either solve it or decide who should be in the room to do so.

If this sounds too high level, too far from the detail, then your project leader isn’t operating at a sufficiently high level and you’re hankering for their job, not yours.

Here’s a screenshot of a dashboard report template. The benefits of this are subtle.

• forces summarising
• provides a resource for reviewing effectiveness later, for continuous improvement
• keeps SG away from the detail
• A one-pager allows easy reference when Executive ask those sudden questions. ‘Last month the budget was 10k under’

There are online resources for doing this. I’ve seen Steering Groups use Trello. But for me, this ‘snapshot’ is useful. Governance is about stepping outside the day to day, not about being in the continuous flow.

Project Leader’s dashboard report for a birthday party project :)

Insight meeting
This is where the project leader brings substantial issues to strategise and think more widely. Sometimes more people are invited, such as other senior staff or externals. For example, during the Children’s Gallery project, we had a workshop on associated commercial products to which the Head of Commercial and the Retail manager were invited. These are structured in any way that fits the need!

Kicking stuff to a different forum
Sometimes SG is the wrong place. Something big, such as ‘let the multimillion-dollar contract so Build can begin’, must be taken up to the Executive. At Museums Victoria, I would table a clear paper to Executive, noting prior Steering Group ‘recommendation to approve.

Something like ‘workshop the launch week’ or ‘begin the readiness project’ reach more broadly across the organisation and so need special one-off activities enabled and championed by a Steering Group member.

Steering Group so white

The governance models of museums need decolonising and queering. Superficially effective Steering Groups unquestioningly replicate old thinking and perpetuate bias. They insist on one true answer, not multiplicities.

The project will need avenues to other forms of discussion: a First Nations Reference Group, for example. The Steering Group must defer to other forms of knowing and being, and actively engage with the challenges. They must support the project leader and team to do so as well. I don’t have the answer, but some thoughts.

• The Steering Group set the internal ‘tone’ for the project. Active refusal to exert judgement over areas in which they are not the appropriate voice is powerful: ‘This isn’t for us to decide’. Also, ‘we don’t know, please consult with ______’ is a very useful response.
• The Steering Group can advocate (or support actions elsewhere) that create First Nations reference groups, and so on. (ACMI’s renewal project has gone further with this than I’ve ever seen, and I hope they talk publicly about it after opening. A genuine reference group alongside traditional governance, a senior curator role in the project with genuine influence and ‘veto’ powers — can’t wait to see where it lands when it opens)
• Work to generate and support inclusion within project discussions. I’ve seen the power of Steering Groups make change through instant overruling of resistance to all-gender toilets.

What don’t they do?

• Detailed reviews and sign-offs; here’s a method for that
• Get stuck into detail that should be resolved at the team level
• Act outside their knowledge and/or authority — some things (fire safety…) need a sign off from somewhere else.

Standard reports and agendas are used. Project Leader and Chair of SG will agree the agenda in advance. Papers are issued two full days in advance of the meetings, and SG members review these before the meeting… keep highlight notes, records decisions and distribute clear actions within a day of the meeting.

Note that SGs are not working groups — if a set of tasks are required to be done to advance the project, these are not the responsibility of the SG as a group. Rather they are to be allocated, delivered by others, and reported back to the SG. This ‘task group’ may comprise SG members, but we always maintain a difference between ‘doing’ and ‘governing’.

Decisions and barrier-busting

The team always need help. Weird admin barriers? Options that need a decision? A facilities manager who won’t let the team into the gallery space because ‘then they might request something be changed’ (true story!!!)? The Steering Group need to make a decision, refer it upwards for decision, or get on the phone and work some stakeholder persuasion. This is the real work of the Steering Group — working partly behind the scenes so that, one day, the facilities manager is happy to see the team and happily arranges power points in that far wall (hurrah!)

Protecting the team from unhelpful interventions

Speaking of the CEO… late changes to the brief, ‘can you just fix the aircon while you’re there?’ and ‘can we please change this content from Elvis to Mozart because we just got a different sponsor…’ are the challenges you were sent to manage. It is on the SG to maintain the line of the original brief or to highlight the consequences of altering it. It’s perfectly OK to change the exhibition content, as long as the cost and overruns, lack or audience testing etc are accepted by the Executive.

The project team should not be put in the position of delivering the impossible. So often, when project teams are ‘dumped on’ from above, it is because there is no mechanism talk about the consequences of change, and that stems from the absence of a functional SG within a well managed organisational model. I don’t believe an Executive or CEO ever intends to cause difficulty for a project team, but they will do so if they don’t get good quality strategic information from their Steering Group.

Some big “however”s…

All of this requires a supportive organisational ecology. A systems-thinking organisation in which the defaults are

• consultation, not solo action,
• acting for the greater good, not personal gain
• skilled diverse staff who are safe, supported and empowered
• a decisive environment that keeps things rolling forwards
• clear project tools, such as the Brief, reporting, project stages, and so on.

Nothing’s perfect. That’s why a good project has contingencies, backups and spares. Steering Groups aren’t the panacea but it’s a lot easier to have one, and a good one, than not.