The reality of responding to a situation like this is that things are changing day by day and hour by hour. We need to be responsive to the changing context, do the right thing for users, especially the front line and coordinate with the rest of the government. Long standing governance mechanisms like monthly board meetings, detailed risk logs and gantt charts fail to facilitate the responsiveness that we so crucially need. This certainly isn’t a time to dispense with governance but never has it been so important to implement it in a way that supports our work.
In this post, we are taking the term ‘governance’ to refer to the whole range of activities including the way people outside a team oversee, monitor, challenge, understand, support, direct, and control our work.