This chapter has positioned IT project governance in the context of corporate governance and IT governance. It has highlighted dysfunctional behaviour and neglect of the governance perspective in project management practice over the last 40 years. It has shown that a fundamental part of the solution is to recognise that projects are undertaken to realise some organisational benefit and recognise that these benefits are usually delivered some time after a project has been implemented. This insight was extended to show that benefits are delivered mainly by operational management rather than project management and that the proper audience for IT project governance includes operational managers, board members and top managers in particular.

The chapter argues that the traditional measure of success ‘on-time on-budget’ is inappropriate for IT project governance. It presents a holistic framework of IT projects in the context of an organisation and lists six key IT project governance questions that should be asked by a board (or other approving authority), top managers and executive project sponsors. The framework and questions are being published by Standards Australia as HB280 and they incorporate and extend the best of the IT project governance prescriptions that currently exist.

Six key IT project governance questions are presented, corresponding to different parts of a project lifecycle.