Set up governance for a lead technology agency relationship as it moved from a completed project engagement into BAU, using my own experience of agency management to build the reporting and reconciliation processes from scratch.
→ Fortnightly budget reconciliation embedded as standard practice.
Problem
The agency relationship had just come off the back of a completed project engagement and was moving into business-as-usual, but no ongoing governance processes existed for that phase. There was no consistent reporting cadence and no regular reconciliation point, so spend and progress weren’t being checked against plan on any fixed schedule.
Context
This sat within the wider delivery rebuild I was leading at Fortescue. The project-phase relationship with the agency had worked well enough on its own terms, but project governance doesn’t automatically carry over into BAU, and nobody had yet built the processes the relationship needed for its next phase.
Business objective
Establish a structured agency management framework that gave the business full visibility of spend, resource, and delivery performance going forward, appropriate to a BAU relationship rather than a project engagement.
Customer/user objective
Senior stakeholders needed confidence that spend and delivery were being tracked properly now that the relationship had moved past its original project scope, without needing to chase the agency directly for updates.
Constraints
The relationship was already live and delivering, so any new governance had to be introduced without disrupting ongoing work. There was no existing BAU template to adapt, since the relationship had only operated under project governance until this point.
Stakeholders
The lead technology agency, senior Fortescue stakeholders who needed spend and delivery visibility, and my own team, who would use the new reporting cadence day to day.
Research and discovery
I reviewed how the relationship had been run during the project phase and identified exactly what stopped applying once it moved to BAU, principally the absence of a recurring reconciliation point and a defined resource model for ongoing work.
Options considered
One option was to let reporting stay informal and only intervene if something looked wrong. Given the relationship was moving into an ongoing phase with no natural project end date to force a review, I judged that reactive governance wouldn’t catch problems early enough, so I built a proactive cadence instead, drawing on my own experience managing agency relationships elsewhere.
Prioritisation
A fixed reconciliation cadence came first, since without a regular checkpoint nothing else in the framework would have a reliable trigger. The resource model evaluation followed once reporting was already surfacing what delivery actually needed.
Delivery
I set up a regular reporting cadence, including fortnightly budget reconciliation, so spend against plan was checked on a fixed schedule as a matter of process, not something surfaced by chance. I evaluated the agency’s resource model against what delivery needed and made the case for additional capacity where the gap was clear. I also produced a structured performance evaluation covering delivery, not just cost, using my own experience of agency management to shape what good governance looked like for this relationship.
Decisions made
The most consequential decision was building governance processes proactively for the BAU phase rather than waiting for a problem to force the issue. I also decided reporting needed a fixed, recurring cadence rather than ad hoc updates, since informal reporting is what the relationship had been running on already.
Trade-offs
Building the governance framework took time away from other delivery priorities early in the engagement. I judged that worthwhile, since the relationship would be running for the long term and the cost of fixing weak governance later, after problems had already occurred, would have been higher.
Business outcome
Financial and delivery visibility on the relationship moved from informal to fully governed, with fortnightly reconciliation as standard practice. The resource model was restructured to better match the actual pace and shape of delivery demand.
Customer outcome
Senior stakeholders now have a reliable, scheduled view of spend, resource, and delivery performance instead of depending on ad hoc updates from the agency.
Lessons learned
A relationship that has run well under project governance still needs its own BAU processes built deliberately, they don’t carry over automatically once the project phase ends. Building that governance proactively, before an issue forces it, is far cheaper than retrofitting it under pressure.
What I'd improve today
I wasn’t involved during the project phase itself, but had I been, I’d have recommended standing up the BAU governance model while that phase was winding down, rather than waiting until the transition had already happened, so there was no gap between project governance ending and BAU governance beginning.
