One conversation per country
On a multi-country programme I run a weekly PM sync with each integration manager, in each country. It is one conversation per country, every week, at a fixed time. Each local team gets a direct line to the programme, and I get the real picture of each country in the words of the person who lives it.
A single large call with everyone sounds more efficient. In my experience it is not. People in a mixed call talk about what is relevant to the whole room, and the local problem that matters most often stays unsaid.
I try to keep the shape of that conversation the same each week: what moved, what is blocked, what is coming, and what the person needs from me. A fixed shape keeps the call short, lets people prepare, and makes a missing item easy to notice. Decisions and actions go into the RAID log afterwards, so the next week starts from a written record and not from memory.
Governance has a cost
Early in a programme, a lot of alignment is needed. The integration managers are still learning the programme, and the project director and I talk often to keep decisions consistent.
Later I dropped some of those alignments with the project director. Once the integration managers were autonomous, there were simply far too many calls.
I never drop an alignment silently. I tell the other person what I am stopping and why, and I leave the door open: if a topic becomes risky again, the conversation comes back. Lighter governance only works when people trust that it can get heavier again.
If a call no longer changes a decision, it is a candidate for removal.
The same logic holds when I look at my own calendar. If I am in a call mostly to listen, the information can usually reach me in writing, and my time is better spent unblocking someone.
How I decide whether a forum stays
- It produces decisions. Or it unblocks someone. Information alone can travel in the status report.
- The right people only. Everyone in the room has something to give or something to decide.
- The rhythm matches the pace. A fast-moving phase needs more contact than a stable one.
- It is reviewed. When a team becomes autonomous, its forums are reviewed too.
A useful test is to ask what would go wrong if a forum disappeared. If the honest answer is that nothing would, the forum is habit and not governance. If the answer is that a decision would wait, a risk would go unseen or two teams would diverge, the forum earns its place.
What stays fixed
The core does not move: the steerco, the PM sync, the technical sync, a weekly RAID log review and one status-report template that the whole PM team fills in the same way. Those give the programme a shared rhythm and a single version of the facts.
What changes is the number of conversations around that core. Autonomy is earned, and the fair response to it is lighter governance, with the time given back to delivery.