Capital Projects

9Using a Project Steering Committee to Improve Executive Decision Making

The best way to leverage your time overseeing a capital project is with a strong steering committee.¹ An effective steering committee protects you from being blindsided by big risks, minimizes wasted time and rework by a project team, and, critically helps you make better decisions that will save you money and get your revenue stream flowing faster.

Let's say you are a sales executive sponsoring a project that will build a factory to make a new product. Customers have told you that a small change in product characteristics will increase sales. You have no project management or technical background. What you really care about is meeting the commitments that you have made to customers. While the project team is responsible for identifying, evaluating, and recommending alternatives, you still have to be involved in decisions about technology or factory design that affect the things you do care about, especially the production schedule. For this example, the new product requires some modifications to the manufacturing process. The change is not huge, but the equipment has never been used quite this way. The feedback from the team is that they need some additional analysis to reduce the technical risk before completing the design. The testing will extend the schedule by three months, which jeopardizes your customer commitments. If the testing is not done, there is a 25 percent chance that you will not meet the ...