Will your governance carry the weight of your capital project?

A capital project puts weight on your decision making in ways day to day work never does. Decisions get bigger, faster and harder to unwind. Reporting has to satisfy a funder as well as a board. Roles that worked comfortably for years start to blur under pressure.

The Project Governance Review finds where that weight will land, before the project does.

A structured, evidence based assessment

I read what you already have, talk to the people who make the decisions, and assess your project governance across eight domains. You receive a scored assessment, a findings discussion, and a written report with prioritised recommendations and a roadmap.

It is confidential, constructive, and written for your board. It tells you where your arrangements are strong, where they are fragile, and what to do about it.

It is not an audit and there is no pass or fail. Most organisations I see are doing more right than they think, and the value is in knowing which of the remaining gaps actually matter.

What gets assessed

  1. Accountability and sponsorship

  2. Structure and roles

  3. Decision making and change control

  4. Risk and assurance

  5. Funder and statutory compliance

  6. Meetings, reporting and information

  7. Stakeholder and communication governance

  8. Capability and resource

Each domain is assessed against defined criteria and scored on a four level scale: absent, informal, defined, embedded.

Defined is the proportionate target for most capital projects. It means the arrangement is written down, understood by the people it names, and used. Embedded is not the goal everywhere, and a review that told a volunteer led congregation to aim for it would be giving advice nobody can act on.

About three weeks from evidence to final report

Week one. You send the documents you already have. I assess them against the criteria before we speak, so the conversation starts from what your paperwork says rather than from a blank page.

Week two. A discovery conversation of up to ninety minutes with the people who hold the decisions. This is where paper and practice get compared, and the gap between them is usually where the useful findings sit. The draft report follows.

Week three. A findings discussion, a corrections round, and the final report issued to your board.

Six months on. A short check in call, included, to see what has held.

What you receive

  • A scored assessment across all eight domains, with the evidence behind every score

  • A findings discussion with your decision makers

  • A written report for your governing body, in plain language a trustee can read comfortably

  • Prioritised recommendations, each traced to a finding, achievable by your organisation

  • A roadmap setting out what to do now, next, and later

  • A six month check in call

The report is written so you can act on it yourself. There is no obligation to take it further.

£1,750, fixed

That covers one capital project, one set of evidence, one discovery conversation, one findings discussion, one written report with a corrections round and final issue, and the six month check in.

What sits outside it: a second project, a repeat presentation to a different forum, and anything the recommendations lead to. Where you want support putting the recommendations in place, that is quoted separately once we both know what is needed.

Who it is for

The review is designed for cultural, heritage and publicly funded organisations running a capital project, at any of three points:

  • At the outset of a new award, when the governance you promised in the application has to become the governance you actually run.

  • Mid delivery, when circumstances change, through a new funder condition, a change of personnel, a cost pressure, or a scope shift.

  • Where arrangements have grown informally and work well enough day to day, but have not been tested by a project of this size.

If a project is already in real difficulty, a review is the wrong first move. It scores a system, it does not firefight. Say so when you get in touch and I will suggest something more useful.

Who carries it out

I lead complex capital projects in historic and cultural environments, and I have spent seven years designing and running project governance across a twenty site estate of listed buildings and scheduled ancient monuments, including board structures, decision authority, reporting and funder compliance. I currently lead a £2.7m National Lottery Heritage Fund supported retrofit of a listed gallery, chair its project board and manage the funder relationship directly.

MSc Project Management (Distinction), University of Winchester. BA (Hons) Event and Business Management (First Class). PRINCE2 Foundation. Lean Management Foundation and Practitioner. TechIOSH. NCRQ Level 6 Applied Health and Safety. Carbon Literacy Trainer. Winner, 2024 Winton Society Award for Outstanding Contribution.

Fixed fee. Start with a conversation.

Tell me about your project and I will tell you honestly whether the review is the right thing for you.