A steering committee that cannot decide
Two distribution businesses merged eight months ago and are integrating their order management systems. The joint steering committee has nine members. Three have not attended a meeting since it was formed; two of those send delegates who cannot commit their function. In the last six weeks the committee has approved a data migration approach and then reversed it twice, and 40 actions remain open, 14 of them past their due date. The compliance lead, whose sign-off the regulator expects before go-live, has attended once and stayed for ten minutes. The integration milestone is eight weeks away and the project manager wants to add a second weekly steering meeting to catch up.
1. Diagnose why the committee is not deciding, and set out what you would change structurally before adding any meeting time.
Read the worked answer
The symptoms point to a decision-rights problem, not a meeting-frequency problem. A second weekly meeting would add attendance burden and produce more reversible decisions, not fewer.
Diagnosis:
- Three absentees plus two non-committing delegates means five of nine seats carry no decision authority. Any vote taken in that room is provisional, which is exactly why decisions are being reversed - people who were not there, or could not bind their function, reopen them later.
- 40 open actions with 14 overdue indicates the forum is being used as a working group. Action volume of that size cannot be tracked by a steering body.
- Reversal twice on the same item is a symptom of the item being approved without a documented rationale and named accountable owner, so it looks negotiable.
Structural changes:
- Re-cut the membership to roles that can actually commit, and formally name a single accountable owner per decision. Delegates are only acceptable with written delegated authority.
- Separate decisions from updates: a decision-only agenda of three to five items, with papers circulated 48 hours ahead; everything else moves to a written update.
- Maintain a decision log recording the decision, the accountable owner, the date and the rationale, and treat a logged decision as closed unless new information is tabled.
Then add meeting time only if the reduced agenda genuinely cannot be cleared.
2. The compliance lead's sign-off gates go-live but they have attended once. How do you handle this without damaging the relationship or letting the milestone slip silently?
Read the worked answer
This is the single highest-consequence stakeholder risk on the project, and it should not be managed by sending more meeting invitations.
Actions:
- Find out what the attendance actually means. One ten-minute appearance usually signals either that the role has been briefed as discretionary, or that the individual is carrying a competing workload. Those need different responses, and you only learn which by asking directly and privately.
- Stop treating the steering committee as the route to sign-off. If the regulator expects that sign-off, the artefacts and questions that sign-off depends on should be identified now - what they need to see, in what form, by when - and agreed with the compliance lead in a short working session rather than assumed.
- Offer a lower-cost engagement route. A fortnightly 20-minute review of a one-page evidence summary is often more achievable than a 90-minute committee slot, and produces a clearer audit trail.
- Surface the risk explicitly. Put on the risk register, with a named owner and a date, the possibility that sign-off is not obtained in time for go-live, and state the consequence: delay, or a conditional go-live with post-implementation remediation.
Do not let the milestone pass without a written confirmation from compliance about whether the eight-week date is achievable on their side.