Governance has a branding problem. Say the word in a room of project managers and watch the energy drain out. Ross Garland built a thirty-year career there anyway. Founder of Ross Garland + Associates, president of P3GQA, co-author of the P3G Guide with Adrian Morey. We’d never actually met before this conversation. Our only connection was a virtual event his company ran, the Megaprojects Conference, where I sat on a PMI Fellows panel. So that’s where we started.
The Iron Law We Haven’t Broken
Ross’ takeaway from the conference in one line: we haven’t improved. Over budget, over time, and under benefits. The same pattern the conference keyspeaker professor Brent Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law, repeating for a century regardless of technology, methodology, or how much smarter we think we’ve gotten.
Flyvbjerg’s fix is blunt: think slow, act fast. Spend the time up front eliminating risk during planning, then move quickly once you do. Most organizations do the opposite. They rush planning and execute slowly, which is exactly backwards.
It’s Not Culture, it’s Turf.
I asked Ross the obvious follow-up: does this vary by region, by how much space a culture gives leaders to slow down and think? His answer surprised me. Culture matters less than you’d expect. What matters more is turf protection, governance forces the question of who owns an outcome, who owns delivery, and that threatens people’s power bases regardless of where they’re sitting. He’d worked with a multinational mining company spending billions on projects and expected disciplined governance. Instead he found they were focused on delivering assets, not business outcomes.
Don’t Replace the Business Person, Support Them.
One of the sharper points in the conversation: when you’re designing a governance board, the instinct is to hand the chair to whoever knows project delivery best. Ross argues that’s backwards. The chair should be a business person, because they own why the investment is happening in the first place. The fix for their inexperience with delivery isn’t replacing them, it’s supporting them. Swap them out and you’ve lost the business conversation entirely.
The Business Case Nobody Opens Again
Ross pointed to a pattern that wrecks benefits realization: the business case gets built to secure funding, and the moment funding is approved, nobody opens it again. If you’re not returning to the business case, you’re not tracking benefits. Benefits realization dies long before anyone notices, because by the time it matters, the project team has already moved on to the next thing.
The Accidental Governance Career
Ross didn’t set out to become a governance expert. A client, a quarter-century ago, asked him to implement an assurance process. He looked at the client’s governance, found it was poor, and told them so before even starting. That’s how he backed into the work that became his career. He’s candid about not being a good project manager himself: too much minutiae, not enough big picture. His words: “My greatest gift to project management was getting out of it.”
One AI Talking to Another AI
On where things are heading, Ross was clear-eyed rather than alarmist. AI can model the perfect governance framework, but it can’t manage the personalities and power dynamics that actually derail governance in practice. His bigger worry: a future where one person’s AI drafts a deliverable and another person’s AI reviews it, with human judgment pushed to the sidelines of decisions that used to require it directly.
Nuggets of Wisdom
The Iron Law hasn’t moved in a century: over budget, over time, under benefits.
Turf protection breaks governance more often than culture does.
Support the business sponsor who lacks delivery experience, don’t replace them.
If nobody’s reopening the business case, nobody’s tracking benefits.
A governance career can start by accident and still become the work of a lifetime.
Ross closed with advice for anyone entering the field: don’t have just one string to your bow. Understand governance, even if you never specialize in it. When a project goes wrong, it’s usually the project manager left holding the blame, with no accountability structure above them to share it.
The question worth sitting with: in your own organization, is anyone still opening the business case after the funding’s been approved or did benefits realization quietly die the day the check cleared?
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