Project Governance for Professional Services

Giving you a way to account for Project Management, Risk, Documentation, and more.

Project Governance items give you a convenient way to account for standard yet dynamic effort related to Professional Services.

Required vs. Non-required Governance Items

Governance items default to being required. This means they will be added to every project.

Non-required governance items can be added to a project by a survey and are helpful for more complex projects.

Example Uses

Examples might include:

  • Project Management time

  • Documentation generation effort

  • General contingency for risk

We allow you to account for these by adding standard or dynamic amounts of effort to a project outside of the normal services.

Effort, Price, and Cost Calculation

Governance price and cost are calculated using a resource in your account. Users can define the effort in one of two ways:

  1. As a percentage of the total effort on a project, multiplied by a resource rate and cost.

  2. A set amount of effort, multiplied by a resource rate and cost.

Create default governance items in Settings

In settings, you can define standard governance items. Navigate to Settings > Governance > Project Governance

Here you can see a full list of Governance items. Required governance items are added to every project.

Screenshot 2024-10-30 at 4.39.17 PM

To add a new item, click + Add Governance.

Here, you can define new default governance items:

  • You can give the governance item a description.

  • Select the resource used to account for the governance item

  • Please select whether you want to define it in terms of a percentage of the total effort on a project or a fixed number of hours via the radio button.

  • Set the percentage or fixed number of hours, depending on your previous selection.

  • You can decide how the platform will handle the effort of governance. By default, the platform will spread the effort across all the phases of your project allocated by service. You can also choose to align the Governance item to a specific phase, or align it to a Project Management Phase. This will impact how our Connectwise Manage integration handles Governance Items.

Click Submit to save your new default item.

Governance in a Project

Within a project, you can modify or remove any of the governance items that were added by default when a user created the project.

You can also create new items with all the same parameters that were available in settings. Note that items created within a project will only exist in the project they were created in.

Governance items' price and cost will be calculated from the rate table selected for a particular project.

Phase Alignment of Price and Cost

Within a project, unless you have selected to align your governance items with a specific phase, a "Project Management" phase will be displayed on the PS Pricing page to account for Project Management Revenue and Cost.

Governance Alignment to Resources, Line of Business, or Service Category

You can specify what services contribute to governance effort for your governance item, and you can also specify how that calculated effort is reapplied to your project. You can specify by Phase, Line of Business/Service Category, along with our other default items. You can also choose to bury the governance effort in the Service revenue, helping avoid pesky questions from clients about why Project Management is needed.