Are you a project manager who's heard about steering committees, but are not a 100% sure
exactly what they do? Well, I'm going to share with you exactly all the roles that the steering
committee plays. And if you want to be a Project Ninja, stick around to the end of this video,
because I have an amazing free download just for you. Hi, if you're new here, welcome, subscribe
to the best career and project management advice channel coming to you every Wednesday. What is a
steering committee? Well, a steering committee is usually made up of senior executives to help
support the project by approving things that need to be approved within a project, removing
roadblocks, anything that is needed to ensure that the project remains on time, scope and budget.
Why do projects even need a steering committee? Well, this becomes really important because
projects are usually linked to company's strategy. And you want to ensure that when you come across
any types of issues, that you, as a project manager can't resolve,
that you have approval from senior executives and they need to be part of that process and
be brought along the life cycle of the project. So that is why you need a project steering committee,
because they're going to help you ensure that they give you budget, the resources,
ensuring that everything you need to deliver on your scope. So what does a steering committee do?
Well, first and foremost, they make decisions. All right. So what kind of decisions do they
make? They make the decisions that are aligned towards strategy. So here's a really good example
of a decision that really the project manager should not be making, or even the project team.
It is something for the steering committee because don't forget they're made up of executives.
So I had one project where we had this amazing vision that we had to bring to life. It dealt with
a lot of technology. And what we found throughout the life cycle of the project is that the original
vision and the technology, once we've done all our research, was not matching whatsoever. Now it
wasn't our job to say, "Okay, guess what? Vision is changing." Or "Guess what? We're now going to
change technology." Whoa, are you kidding? This was a huge strategic initiative. What we did is
we brought it up to the steering committee. It is their job, the executive team to go,
"All right, we now have to figure out whether we're changing the vision or we're changing the
technology." That's why they get paid the big bucks. Now it was our job to provide
all the pros and cons and give them all the information so that they can understand what
kind of decision they were making and the impact it was going to have on the project.
So this is why steering committees are so important. It is about strategy
and it is something that you want to have alignment with, but you really have to ensure
that it is a decision of the senior executives to give the final yay or nay, not the project
manager. That's why you need a steering committee. Resolve escalated issues. Okay, key word here,
escalated. Escalated. Can I say that again? So what's really important is the project manager and
the project team are there to resolve issues. Absolutely not every issue should be brought up
to the steering committee. However, there are times where you cannot resolve every issue.
You may have some roadblocks, there may be some politics, whatever it may be.
So things that the team and the project manager can't resolve on their own needs
to be escalated up to the steering committee, because again, they're made up of executives.
They're also made up of departments who are involved in the project,
probably even the customer, who's going to be getting the deliverable. They're part of that
steering committee too. So you want to make sure that if you can't resolve the issue, you escalate
it to the steering committee so they can remove that roadblock for you. Approves and monitors.
All right. Just like escalated issues, you want to give to the steering committee certain things
for them to approve and even to monitor because things are constantly changing on projects. So
you want to ensure that everything that you're doing is aligned with strategy and strategies
change within the organization too. So you want to make sure if anything happens there,
that you're not aware of, your steering committee is bringing that information down to you, but
there's some fundamental things that as a project you want to bring to the attention of the steering
committee and get their final approval, it could be on mass communication around change management.
It could be on the fundamentals like the project charter. You just want to ensure that certain key
things does get vetted through senior executive so they're aware of it. And it's only going to
help you because as you progress, you can always say to them, "Hey, you approved that already. Why
are you changing your mind?" If they come to you and they want to make changes. So it's just really
important, a little bit of formality, but it helps tremendously. Receive status updates. Now, if
you've ever watched my other YouTube videos, you know when I talk about meetings, how much I hate
update meetings, I can't stand them. However, this is the only time where I go, "Updates
are acceptable for steering committees." Why? Because think about it. These are individuals,
high profile people, extremely busy. They're probably coming to your meeting once a month.
They're not in the loop of what's going on, so you have to provide them an update. So by providing
them an update and giving them a status and all the deliverables that helps out tremendously
so that when they're making decisions on your behalf, because you've escalated things to them,
they have an idea, sort of their finger on the pulse. You're just helping the process along
by giving them an update. This is when updates are definitely acceptable. Now that you know
what a steering committee does, I'm curious to know if you're going to really rush out
there and try to get steering committees for your projects. But even before that,
before you even try to get a steering committee, I want you to go to the link below and grab
this. These are checklists on things that you need to be aware of to ensure your projects don't fail,
and then ultimately give you project success. So on that note, please subscribe to this channel,
share it with everybody that you know, and if you have any additional things
that you think steering committees should do, please let me know in the comments below.