Teach on Udemy

Turn what you know into an opportunity and reach millions around the world.

Learn More

Your cart is empty.

Keep shopping

Project Governance: Roles, Decisions, Accountability [EN]

Created byPapaHR ★ 160K students: Courses in Human Resources, HR, SHRM, AI Talent Analytics, HRMS, HRIS, CIPD, Claude, HRCI, PHR, Rewards

Last updated 8/2026

English

English [Auto],

What you'll learn

Write a project charter that gives you actual authority rather than a title
Decide whose approval genuinely counts, using stakeholder influence and interest analysis
Build a responsibility matrix where every deliverable has exactly one owner, not three
Read a matrix structure and locate where decision rights actually sit inside it
Describe a role so that someone can be held to it, using job analysis and behavioural competencies
Run the meeting where a decision is made, and close it with owners and a record
Escalate properly: what gets escalated, to whom, and what happens if nobody answers
Connect a project outcome to the performance cycle so accountability survives the closing report
Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Course content

13 sections • 37 lectures • 19h 9m total length

What Project Management Is: PMBOK 7 Principles and Domains36:56
What a project is, and the four stages it goes through
Project management as a way of delivering a result
The role of the project manager and where its authority is supposed to come from
The PMBOK 7 principles and performance domains
The Charter and Business Case: Where a Project's Authority Comes From27:00
Collecting ideas and turning one into a business case
Developing the charter, which is the founding governance document
Cost-benefit analysis and the documentation
Selecting which project gets implemented and who signs that off
Stakeholders: Listing, Ranking and Deciding Whose Approval Counts23:50
Who your stakeholders are, including the ones nobody listed
Compiling and prioritising the list
Ways of engaging them
Assessing influence and interest, which is how you find the real approvers

Project Scope: Boundaries, Assumptions and What Is Explicitly Out21:33
Establishing the project is needed at all
Defining the start and end points
Defining boundaries, and writing down what is explicitly excluded
Documented assumptions as a governance instrument
The Project Plan: Breakdown, Risks and the Network Diagram25:58
Breaking the project into parts and labelling them
Describing the plan as a diagram
Identifying risks while it is still cheap to react
Time planning and the network diagram
Schedule and People: Durations, Gantt and the Responsibility Matrix16:31
Methods for estimating duration
Displaying the schedule, including the Gantt chart
Identifying who is involved
The human resources matrix, where every deliverable gets exactly one owner

Team Work: Matrix Structures, Roles and Allocating Accountability19:25
Building the structure for the project
Working in a matrix, where the person you need has another manager
Defining roles and responsibilities so nothing has two owners
Kicking off and running the team
Control and Reporting: Deviations, Escalation and Communications26:13
What project control actually consists of
The reporting system and monitoring spend
Handling deviations, and what gets escalated to whom
Project meetings and the communications plan
Closing a Project: Administration, Results and Lessons Recorded24:00
Planning the closure rather than letting it trail off
Administrative matters
Surveying the results
Recording the lessons so the next project inherits them
Budget and Uncertainty: Cost Types, Three Stages, Risk Response22:27
Project cost and the types of it
The three stages of a project budget and who approves each
Identifying and assessing risk factors
Managing risk under the uncertainty domain

What Organisational Design Is and Who Is Responsible for It41:52
What organisational design means in practice
Who owns it inside a company
The organisational design process
The five steps
Studying the Business Situation: The Star Model and Six Drivers35:57
Which problem the current structure was built to solve
Strategic priorities and the star model
The typical problems that signal a structure has run out
Setting the goal, starting the change, and the six design drivers
Choosing the Structure: Archetypes and Three Types of Matrix38:17
Applying the six drivers to the choice
Choosing the structure that fits the problem
Organisational archetypes
When a matrix is the answer, and the three types of it

Integrating the Structure: Operating Models and Levels of Control40:13
Designing for operational management
Operating models and levels of management
Matrix management, networks and boundaries
Diagnostic indicators, and how power is distributed inside a matrix
Talent and Leadership: Accountability, Cascade and Span of Control40:51
Designing the leadership structure
Defining top-level accountability and the options for it
The matrix top team and the leadership cascade
Organisational levels, span of control and good staffing decisions
Transition to a New Structure: Phased, Pilot or All at Once35:33
Developing the implementation plan
Whether to move at once or in phases
Whether a pilot makes sense
Managing the transition, launching the structure and the workflows

What a Job Profile Is and What It Consists Of48:53
What a job profile is and which sections it contains
Why governance without written roles collapses into personalities
What job analysis means in practice
Who should write it
Techniques for Building a Profile: Interviews, Surveys, Observation43:22
Interviewing people currently doing the job
Interviewing the manager, who often describes a different job
Questionnaires for collecting information
Observing the work, and the profile inside process management
Describing Competencies for a Role: Research and Wording40:57
What competencies are
Why they matter for holding someone accountable
How to research them
How to describe them so two people read them identically

Ready-Made Competency Libraries and Job Descriptions31:40
An overview of the existing competency libraries
Ready-made job descriptions
How to use existing material without importing someone else's structure
Using the Profile for Hiring, Development, Appraisal and Goals29:48
Developing a scorecard from the profile
Building a career ladder
Building a development plan
Setting goals and indicators for the role

What Facilitation Is: Principles, the Role and How Decisions Land31:52
How facilitation relates to decision making
The basic principles
The role of the facilitator, which is neutral by design
The single most important facilitator skill
Preparing a Session: The Goal, the Participants and the Opening27:41
The main stages of preparation
Formulating the decision the session is meant to produce
Selecting who is in the room, which decides most of the outcome
How to open the session
Running a Session: Holding Focus, Generating Ideas, Prioritising24:59
Keeping participants focused and managing the group
Taking notes without losing the thread
Gathering information and generating options
Choosing priorities as a group

Closing a Session: Owners, Evaluation and Difficult Participants24:47
Summing up what was actually decided
Assigning owners, without which the meeting produced nothing
Evaluating the session
Force majeure and difficult participants
Reaching Agreement: Decisions, Atmosphere and Unsticking a Group26:02
How a group actually arrives at a decision
Maintaining the atmosphere
Exercises that move a stuck room
Agenda and Timing: Online Sessions, Large and International Groups25:49
Building the agenda and estimating timing
Facilitating online
Facilitating large meetings
Working with an international group

Requirements

A project or programme where the question "who decides this" has already come up
No certification needed. PMBOK 7, RACI and organisational design are introduced from scratch
Willingness to write down decisions that are currently made informally
English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
A spreadsheet for the responsibility matrix and the role profiles

Description

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Ask five people on a struggling project who decides a given question and you will get five answers, all of them delivered confidently.

That is a governance failure, and it is invisible until the moment a decision is needed quickly.

What weak governance looks like from inside

The project has a sponsor who approved it and has not been in a meeting since. Two people believe they own the same deliverable, which means neither of them does. An escalation goes up and simply stops, because nobody defined what happens when the person escalated to does not respond. A steering committee meets monthly, reviews slides and decides nothing, since deciding was never actually its remit. And the project closes successfully while nobody can say who is now accountable for the thing it produced.

None of these are effort problems. They are the absence of a written answer to the question of who decides what.

How the course is structured

Thirty-seven lessons in five parts. The project layer first, ten lessons of PMBOK 7 focused specifically on the governance elements: the charter, which is where a project manager's authority legally comes from, stakeholder analysis to find the people whose approval genuinely counts, the responsibility matrix that gives every deliverable one owner, escalation and deviation handling, and a closure that records decisions rather than just results.

Then the organisational layer, which is where decision rights actually live. Eight lessons on organisational design: the six drivers, structural archetypes, and the matrix in particular — when it is the right answer, which of the three types you need, and how power is distributed inside it, because an undefined matrix is the single most common source of governance confusion.

Roles, the decision meeting and accountability afterwards

Then roles on paper. Job analysis, profile techniques and describing competencies precisely enough that a person can be held to them, because governance that lives only in people's heads is not governance.

Then the meeting where decisions are supposed to happen: preparation, who is in the room, running it, and closing with named owners and a record. And finally the performance layer — OKR and cascading, check-ins, evaluating results through MBO and KPIs, the review meeting, and every decision that follows from it. This is what makes accountability survive the closing report.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Wargaming is one of the structural cases in this course.

What is included

Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources

The test that starts it

Take your current project and write down the last three decisions that were made. Next to each, the name of the person who made it. If any line has two names or none, you have found where the governance is missing. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.

Who this course is for:

Project and programme managers accountable for outcomes with unclear authority
PMO leads setting up governance for the first time
Steering committee members who are not sure what the committee actually decides
Sponsors who approve projects and then discover they were expected to do more
Operations and transformation leaders where several projects share the same people
Department heads whose projects stall waiting for a decision nobody owns
Anyone who has watched a project fail while everyone involved did their part

Project Governance: Roles, Decisions, Accountability [EN]

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

The Governance Foundation: PMBOK 7, the Charter and Who Approves3 lectures • 1hr 28min

Scope, Plan and Schedule: Where Accountability Gets Assigned3 lectures • 1hr 4min

Budget, Uncertainty and Authority You Do Not Formally Have4 lectures • 1hr 32min

Where Decision Rights Live: Organisational Design and Six Drivers3 lectures • 1hr 56min

The Matrix: Distributing Power, Accountability and Span of Control3 lectures • 1hr 57min

Transition, Delivery and Cases of Structures That Worked2 lectures • 1hr 16min

Roles on Paper: Job Analysis and What a Profile Contains3 lectures • 2hr 13min

Competency Libraries and Using a Profile to Assign Accountability2 lectures • 1hr 1min

The Decision Meeting: Principles, Preparation and Running It3 lectures • 1hr 25min

Closing With Owners, Reaching Agreement and Facilitating at Scale3 lectures • 1hr 17min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: