Most leadership teams are not short of reports. They are short of reports they believe. Norcadia Advisory designs project and programme governance, RAID processes and executive dashboards that surface problems while there is still time to act — for organisations in London and across the UK.
Governance fails quietly. It rarely announces itself — it shows up as surprises that should not have been surprises.
Problems reach the board fully formed, at the point where the options are already limited.
The status pack takes days to produce and nobody reads it before the meeting.
Everything is green until it is suddenly red, with no amber in between.
The RAID log exists but has not been reviewed in weeks, and entries have no named owner.
Decisions get deferred across multiple forums because it is unclear who has authority.
Different parts of the organisation report the same programme differently.
The aim is not more governance. It is less governance that works — fewer forums, clearer authority, and reporting that tells leadership something they did not already know.
Forums, membership, terms of reference and meeting cadences — designed around decisions that need making, not meetings that need filling.
RAID log setup, ownership assignment and a review process that keeps risks and issues moving rather than accumulating.
Reporting templates and dashboards built for the decision being made, using the Microsoft tooling you already have.
Who needs what information, at what frequency, in what form — and who is currently being over- or under-communicated to.
A decision log and actions framework so commitments made in a forum are visible and chased between forums.
A defined, safe path for bad news to travel upward early — the single most reliable predictor of whether governance actually works.
Framed for organisations that already have governance on paper but are not getting decisions out of it.
Review the existing forums, packs and RAID artefacts, and sit in on the meetings. What governance does on paper and what it does in the room are usually two different things, and the gap is where the work is.
Get an honest baseline in front of leadership quickly — every open risk and issue named, owned and dated. This is often uncomfortable and always clarifying.
Redesign the forums, reporting and decision rights. Usually this means removing meetings rather than adding them, and moving authority closer to the people with the information.
Templates, dashboards and terms of reference handed over with documentation, plus a few cycles of running alongside the team so the new rhythm holds once we step back.
Created a risk and issue management process supported by workshops, dashboards and executive reporting, giving leaders visibility of risks affecting delivery and company objectives.
Anonymised to protect client confidentiality.
Project governance is the framework of forums, roles, reporting and decision rights that determines how a project is directed and controlled. Good governance answers three questions continuously: what is actually happening, who owns the response, and who decides what happens next. Where governance fails, it is usually because it produces reports rather than decisions.
A RAID log records Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies. It matters because it is the single place where things that could derail delivery are named and owned. Most RAID logs fail not because the format is wrong but because entries have no owner, no date and no review cadence — so the log becomes a record rather than a management tool.
Trust in reporting breaks when the reported status and the real status diverge — usually because reporting is optimistic by default and there is no safe route to escalate bad news. The fix combines changing what is measured, shortening the path between the people doing the work and the people making decisions, and designing a status model where an honest amber is a normal outcome rather than a career risk.
A typical governance and reporting engagement runs 2 to 6 weeks for design and implementation, with ongoing advisory available afterwards. We can also carry out a shorter audit of existing governance and recommend targeted improvements without a full redesign.
Both. Process design without a working reporting artefact tends not to survive contact with a busy team. We design the governance model and build the executive dashboards and reporting templates that make it run, typically using the Microsoft tooling organisations already have rather than introducing new systems.
For projects already delayed, red-rated or lacking clear ownership.
Read more →Practical PMO processes and reporting cadences teams will actually use.
Read more →Automate the manual reporting cycles that governance depends on.
Read more →Describe how your governance runs today and we will tell you where the gap between reported and real is most likely to be.