6Q Governance

6Q Governance is based on the research of ​Dr Raymond Young. His research has been published by Standards Australia as a handbook explaining how boards and top managers influence business projects to succeed (HB280). His research is potentially the first major breakthrough on IT project failure in over 50 years and some indicators suggest his concepts could increase GDP by 1.6% – 3.1%.

Dr Young’s career alternates between industry, consulting and academia. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Business at the University of NSW Canberra. He has a decade of management consulting experience culminating in a CIO role within Fujitsu Australia.

Dr Young is a fellow of the Australian Institute of Project Management (FAIPM) and a fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia (FGIA). He is a founding member of the committee that developed the Australian and international governance standards AS8016 and ISO38500. 

In the same way that doctors know where to listen to diagnose the health of a patient, 6Q Governance provides the 6 questions needed to diagnose the health of a project. By asking these 6 questions boards, senior managers, project sponsors and their advisors will know whether their strategy/policy is on track and whether a project is likely to deliver the expected benefits.

Why do we need 6Q Governance? 
We need 6Q Governance because although projects are undertaken to implement strategy the evidence suggests fewer than 10% of strategies are fully implemented [1], most large projects fail to live up to expectations [2] and between half to two thirds of projects either fail outright or deliver no discernible benefits [3]. This result appears to be no better in the public sector where hundreds of billions of dollars are invested annually in projects that contribute little to policy goals [4].

Continue reading “WHAT IS 6Q GOVERNANCE?”

6Q Governance was developed from a research handbook published by Standards Australia [1]. Cases were conducted of successful and unsuccessful projects in typical and exemplary organisations and diagnostic questions were developed to identify what needed to be asked to have assurance projects will succeed. 6 Questions were found to be sufficient. These 6 questions were then tested against a large database of international projects and found to correlate quite strongly against project success [2].
​References
[1] Standards Australia. HB280 Case Studies – How boards and senior management have governed ICT projects to succeed (or fail). Young R editor (Standards Australia, 2006).
[2] Young, R., Chen, W., Quazi, A., Parry, W., Wong, A. & Poon, S. K. The relationship between project governance mechanisms and project success: An international dataset. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business. (forthcoming)