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Who Actually Has the Authority to Decide This?
"Who actually has the authority to decide this?" — the confusion that stalls decisions when no one's sure who can say yes. Less commonly explained than scope/schedule, so there's room to be a genuinely useful, clear resource on it.
Madera Bibb
8/31/20262 min read
Every project eventually hits a moment where a decision needs to be made, and nobody in the room is quite sure who's actually allowed to make it. The conversation stalls. Someone says they'll "check with someone." Days pass. The decision that should have taken ten minutes takes two weeks.
That's not a communication problem. It's a governance problem — and it's one most projects never actually solve, because nobody wrote down who has authority over what until the moment it was already needed.
Why This Gets Overlooked
Scope, schedule, and budget all get planned because everyone knows they need to be planned. Governance rarely gets the same attention, because it feels less like a "thing to build" and more like something that should just be obvious. In practice, it's almost never obvious — especially once a project involves more than a couple of people.
The result is a familiar pattern: decisions either stall waiting for unclear approval, or they get made by whoever happens to be in the room, regardless of whether that's actually their call. Neither outcome is good, and both are avoidable.
What a Governance Management Plan Actually Defines
A Governance Management Plan answers the questions that only become urgent once they're not answered:
Governance structure — the different levels of oversight on a project, typically split into executive, project, and operational layers, each with a different scope of authority.
Decision authority — who can approve what, at what threshold. A project manager might approve day-to-day operational decisions, while a sponsor or steering committee handles anything touching budget or scope changes above a certain size.
Escalation process — a defined path for what happens when a decision can't be resolved at the level it started at, so issues don't just sit unresolved.
Governance meetings and reporting — a regular cadence for reviewing project health and performance at the appropriate level, instead of ad hoc updates that may or may not reach the right people.
What Changes Once This Exists
The value of a governance plan shows up exactly in the moment described at the start: a real decision needs to be made, and instead of a stall, there's a clear answer. Everyone already knows who owns that call. The project keeps moving instead of waiting on an answer that should have been defined weeks earlier.
It's not about adding bureaucracy to a project. It's about removing the ambiguity that causes delays — the same ambiguity that, left unaddressed, tends to resurface at the worst possible moment.
Get Started
The Governance Management Plan Template is available now as an instant download — a clear framework for decision authority, escalation, and reporting, ready to customize for your project.
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