This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Ask five people on a struggling project who decides a given question and you will get five answers, all of them delivered confidently.

That is a governance failure, and it is invisible until the moment a decision is needed quickly.

What weak governance looks like from inside

The project has a sponsor who approved it and has not been in a meeting since. Two people believe they own the same deliverable, which means neither of them does. An escalation goes up and simply stops, because nobody defined what happens when the person escalated to does not respond. A steering committee meets monthly, reviews slides and decides nothing, since deciding was never actually its remit. And the project closes successfully while nobody can say who is now accountable for the thing it produced.

None of these are effort problems. They are the absence of a written answer to the question of who decides what.

How the course is structured

Thirty-seven lessons in five parts. The project layer first, ten lessons of PMBOK 7 focused specifically on the governance elements: the charter, which is where a project manager's authority legally comes from, stakeholder analysis to find the people whose approval genuinely counts, the responsibility matrix that gives every deliverable one owner, escalation and deviation handling, and a closure that records decisions rather than just results.

Then the organisational layer, which is where decision rights actually live. Eight lessons on organisational design: the six drivers, structural archetypes, and the matrix in particular — when it is the right answer, which of the three types you need, and how power is distributed inside it, because an undefined matrix is the single most common source of governance confusion.

Roles, the decision meeting and accountability afterwards

Then roles on paper. Job analysis, profile techniques and describing competencies precisely enough that a person can be held to them, because governance that lives only in people's heads is not governance.

Then the meeting where decisions are supposed to happen: preparation, who is in the room, running it, and closing with named owners and a record. And finally the performance layer — OKR and cascading, check-ins, evaluating results through MBO and KPIs, the review meeting, and every decision that follows from it. This is what makes accountability survive the closing report.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Wargaming is one of the structural cases in this course.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

The test that starts it

Take your current project and write down the last three decisions that were made. Next to each, the name of the person who made it. If any line has two names or none, you have found where the governance is missing. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.