Shared Services Governance: It’s Alive!

Greetings again from the IQPC’s 11^th annual Shared Services Summit. Here's another guest blog from my colleague Don Flores, a TPI partner focused on service management and governance. 

Good news from the Shared Services Confab: Many servicing professionals are as passionate about the governance of shared services as I am.

Now, to paraphrase Paul Harvey, the rest of the story: Governance is a living, breathing thing that needs to change as your organization does, and not everyone gets this. Just coming up with a bunch of checklists is not going to do it.

For shared services, oversight boards and committees need to make both control and enablement equal partners of their charters. Those may seem like somewhat conflicting mandates – “controlling” overseers may not be thought of as “enabling” change – but this goes to the fact that governance truly is (or ought to be) a profession, not a punch list.

Your governance should flex and morph depending on what stage you’re at in the establishment of your shared services.  The priorities will be different as you move from initial implementation to a steady state or to a big change or overhaul such as adding scope to the work or outsourcing another function.

What shared-services governance issues do you find yourself or your clients struggling with? I’d like to hear from you.