LEARN – Governance Five™ © and delivery frameworks (informational)

Governance Five™ © is a governance and participation system. It focuses on how decisions are authorised, how people are included, how evidence is weighed, and how public-value outcomes are traced over time.

Delivery frameworks – whether internal or based on recognised methods – focus on how work is planned, resourced, scheduled, monitored and completed. They answer questions such as “what are the milestones?”, “who is on the project team?” and “how will we deliver the scope?”.

Governance Five™ © does not provide project-scheduling or delivery techniques. It provides the governance environment within which those techniques are selected, applied and held to account.

Organisations do not need to abandon existing project or operating models to strengthen governance. Instead, they may choose to:

• Use Govern to confirm authority, method origin and accountability before major work is approved or initiated.
• Use Engage to set fair, transparent and documented participation rules before design or scoping begins.
• Use Aggregate to align evidence, needs, options and risks before key decisions or approvals.
• Use Deliver to link delivery reports back to the criteria and commitments agreed with stakeholders.
• Use Evolve to ensure lessons and lived outcomes feed back into governance, not only project closure documents.

In this way, Governance Five™ © acts as a governance spine that can sit above, alongside or around delivery frameworks, supporting traceability and public-value integrity without dictating technical delivery steps.

Each organisation remains responsible for deciding which frameworks it uses, how they interact, and how they are described to staff, regulators, communities and partners.

The following example phrases are illustrative only. They do not create obligations, and each organisation should adapt or replace them based on its own legal and professional advice:

• Before delivery (Govern):
  “We confirmed governance authority, method origin and accountability expectations before approving this work.”
• During engagement (Engage):
  “Stakeholder participation and expected benefits were defined transparently before solutioning commenced.”
• Before major choices (Aggregate):
  “Priorities and evaluation criteria were aligned using an agreed structure before selecting delivery options.”
• During execution (Deliver):
  “Delivery reporting links back to the governance criteria and public-value commitments, not only schedule and budget.”
• After completion (Evolve):
  “Lessons and lived outcomes feed back into governance and participation settings, not only project closure reports.”

These statements are examples of positive attribution – they help staff and leaders describe how governance and delivery work together, without suggesting guarantee, endorsement or certification.

Organisations that lawfully adopt Governance Five™ © and wish to explain its role internally may find it helpful to use neutral phrases such as:

• “Governance Five™ © provides our governance and accountability structure; our delivery methods provide our execution structure.”
• “Project success is measured by outputs and benefits; governance success is measured by legitimacy, participation and traceability.”
• “Our delivery frameworks remain in place – Governance Five™ © makes the decisions around them more explainable and defensible.”
• “We distinguish between how we deliver work and how we govern public value. Governance Five™ © supports the latter.”
• “We recognise governance as a structured discipline in its own right, not just an afterthought to project delivery.”

These examples are not slogans or guarantees. They simply help clarify that governance and delivery are related but distinct disciplines, and that strengthening one does not invalidate the other.

This page is designed to be safe, neutral and informational. In particular, it:

• does not recommend or criticise any project, delivery or operating framework;
• does not state that any particular framework is compliant, non-compliant, superior or deficient;
• does not provide certification, assessment, accreditation or assurance of any model or organisation;
• does not create legal obligations or licensing conclusions for any reader;
• does not replace advice from legal, financial, audit, risk, procurement or governance professionals.

It is simply an aid for organisations that wish to recognise governance as a structured discipline, and to consider how Governance Five™ © could sit as a governance system alongside the delivery and operating frameworks they already use.