The Business Integrated Governance Body of Knowledge has been collated to describe how organisations can leverage integrated governance to address many of their challenges with strategy delivery, and spin off benefits throughout lower levels of decision making throughout an organisation.

Rather than attempt to define new knowledge for strategy, governance, finance, change, operations or product management leaders – its focus is on getting all these elements balanced and working for the organisation purpose.

One organisation that has exploited integrated governance was presented by Chris Bragg at his BIG Professional Exam. While the example was from several years ago, there are many elements of integrated Governance to demonstrate to organisations in a similar position. Subsequent to his exam, Chris (who was a consultant at the time) and Mohammed Sherif who was Manager of the Group IT PMO kindly agreed to a recorded discussion on the case with David Dunning – founder of the BIG CIC.

The telecoms company concerned was a large single country organisation that went via a huge investment programme through a multi year strategy.

What the Group IT PMO Manager and the Group Strategy Manager did was define and implement the capability to enable the organisation to stay on top of its strategic change, and balance it with operational key performance indicators.

Chris and Sherif reflect that the only way to deliver a complex, multi year, multi $billion, multi country investment process was to rapidly implement integrated governance.

One result was stunning. Upon a later acquisition, the organisation was able to demonstrate evidence of value in the strategic pipeline to substantially increase the purchase price.

All in all, through the investment process, the company saw a c. 3 fold return on investment in a very short space of time. The strategy and the related profit would not have been possible without integrated governance.

The following content is a summary of the conversation led by David with Sherif and Chris.

1. What were the pains / expectations that you addressed?

• Pains:
  • Rapid organisational growth (from 1 to 30+ operations in a short time) created fragmentation.
  • Lack of visibility across projects/programmes in different countries.
  • Inconsistent data quality, processes, and reporting.
  • Cultural differences and siloed ways of working.
  • Limited maturity of PMOs in several units.
• Expectations:
  • Build a unified governance framework.
  • Enable real-time, accurate, and consolidated decision-making data.
  • Create accountability across multiple geographies.
  • Support strategy execution by aligning projects to strategic objectives.

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2. What was the sponsorship level and stakeholder engagement you had?

• Strong sponsorship from CIO and later the Group Strategy leadership team.
• Stakeholder engagement:
  • Initially led from IT, then adopted organisation-wide.
  • Key stakeholders included country-level PMOs, group PMO, strategic programme boards, and executives.
  • Units were encouraged to opt-in voluntarily, which built genuine buy-in and reduced resistance.

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3. What picture of overall solution components did you build?

• Components implemented (BIG-aligned):
  • Data & Information Backbone: automated data collection, consistent KPIs, dashboards.
  • Governance: definition of governance nodes (group, regional, country, departmental PMOs).
  • Accountability: clear mandates for project sponsors, PMOs, and executives.
  • Processes & Tools: templates, workflows, reporting standards, KPI portal, project/portfolio management systems.
  • Support Functions: training, functional support for PMOs and project managers.
  • Leadership & Assurance: executive sponsorship, quality assurance, maturity-building initiatives.

On reflection ALL of the BIG Components were a part of the ecosystem the organisation had already, refined or built (in some shape or form).

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4. What was the organisational scope (Accountability Nodes / Governance Bodies)?

• Accountability Nodes:
  • Group PMO → Regional PMOs → Country-level PMOs → Departmental PMOs.
  • Project sponsors, programme sponsors, and strategic boards.
  • Multi Country engagement
• Governance Bodies:
  • Group Executive Committee, Group Strategy, Group IT, Regional Management Boards.
  • Local country boards feeding into group governance.

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5. What Was Done / Presenters’ Role?

• Sherif: Led IT PMO, initiated group PMO, championed integrated governance vision.
• Chris: Partnered in methodology & implementation, designed governance models, supported tool/process rollout.

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6. Share the difficulties experienced through the initiative.

• Resistance to change (units wanting independence).
• Cultural differences (e.g., different levels of maturity across different countries).
• Technical challenges: bandwidth/connectivity issues.
• Conflicting perspectives across departments (IT vs. finance vs. strategy).
• Variations in PMO maturity — required phased training and capacity building.

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7. What did you achieve / would you have achieved using BIG that was not in another model?

BIG was not available at the time – but we had no model framework for:

• End-to-end integration of strategy, governance, and operations — ensuring all projects tied directly to strategic objectives.
• Multi-perspective portfolio management — IT, HR, engineering, and strategy views all using the same consistent data backbone.
• Cultural and voluntary adoption model — not forced, but encouraged participation, creating stronger collaboration.
• Scalability & maturity-building — phased approach lifted entire organisation’s capability step by step.
• ROI & resilience — enabled faster decisions, improved efficiency, and built financial resilience during turbulence.

In this situation – this capability had to fall into place within 12 months for the organisation to be able to cope with and deliver value from its strategic direction.

Calls to Action

Chris and Sherif had to work this out for themselves. The guidance for any organisation that wishes to rapidly build a strategic governance framework is now available to be consulted.

Key factors:

From the Initiative	BIG Comment
Leadership – desire, purpose	In this scenario, the protagonists were able to express the need, and gain executive support (CEO and CIO) and achieve further support from the country locations affected.
Culture and Approach:  – willingness for everyone to do what it takes  – easier to manage projects	Chris and Sherif mentioned several times the can do nature of members of the organisation.
Engagement from local areas	The BIG Comment is that this and the previous point sound like the energised change culture needed for cross functional and cross location changes like those achieved here.
Information and Data:  – importance of data – collecting, quality, structure  – information emerging on timely basis, not specifically collated	The BIG Comment is that having spoken on and off the record – the strategy information model needed to support decision making in every location at every level was well thought through and used at the heart of managing accountability and operating governance. The model was driven rather than mined out of a mass of data that stakeholders could have provided if they were not structured,

BIG CIC Conclusion? If you are serious about driving vital strategy systematically through an organisation – you don’t have to work all of this out from scratch – but Think BIG.

Access :

• Body of Knowledge to learn more
• Presentation Materials and Recording, and Access to a simple Readiness Model
• Learn about BIG CIC Membership
• Exams
• Consult the list of BIG Professionals (have passed the BIG Professional Exam) about where to start your journey.

Become a BIG Member to be notified as the chapters from the conversation are released on the BIG YouTube Site.

Meet Chris and David at the BIG CONFERENCE

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