Pursuing good governance? It’s about time. And I mean that literally because, right there alongside money, time is your most precious resource and needs to be at least as well managed. Otherwise, you’ll never get done – or worse, you’ll get done poorly.
The thing is, time is every bit as finite, measurable, and valuable as money – maybe even more so because, unlike cash, you can’t request more when it runs out. So whether time is either poorly budgeted or wasted due to organizational non-responsiveness, your well-conceived and -funded initiative will stall, drag, or even collapse under its own weight.
Time Is Undervalued
We spend an extraordinary amount of energy helping our organizations better classify, secure, retain, and dispose of our business-critical information. We design structures so people can find what they need when they need it. We talk endlessly about privacy, quality, and efficiency. And we do this in order to reduce risk or unlock opportunities.
Yet one resource often silently determines the success or failure of all of this work, and it’s one that leaders routinely undervalue:
Time.
Covering all the aforementioned ground requires cross-functional alignment, consistent decision-making, and disciplined change management – none of which happens in the cracks between meetings or at the tail end of 10-hour days.
To make it all fit, people usually won’t stop working with you, but they will cut corners. They won’t take meetings or respond to emails in a timely manner, forcing us to nag them to the point of resentment. They’ll give snap answers to our questions that may be incomplete or out of context, forcing us to guess at what needs or desires they have, and why. They’ll leave loose ends that we have to tie up without them or leave unaddressed, perhaps causing us to spend even more time and money down the road.
So you need to build in enough time for people to think, plan, review, and execute. Otherwise, even the best-designed governance framework is likely to underperform, or self-destruct along the way.
If It’s Important, Allow Proper Time for It
My 30 years as a consultant tells me that nearly every project will proceed in fits and starts as we wait for input from the folks we’re serving – it’s just the nature of the human beast. But you can make life a lot easier for yourself by avoiding the temptation to set a deadline and then craft a governance project plan to fit.
- Case in point: IT says “we need to implement the [insert new system here] by the end of the first quarter,” and you have to scramble to complete your information prep work to meet that deadline.
- Or you interpret the executive tea leaves as meaning “they want us to be done in [insert random number of months here],” whether or not anyone’s thought about how long it will actually take.
Whatever the circumstances, it’s critical to set the timeline to match the work – or vice versa, if forced to. Anything else, and you’ll either not finish, or not finish well – neither of which is an especially desirable outcome.