ROMAN Consulting Group
Governance Consulting
By the time a capital project enters execution, up to 80% of its total cost has already been committed, not estimated, not forecast, committed. Bias doesn't feel like bias in the moment; it feels like good judgment. ROMAN Consulting Group provides independent governance consulting for capital projects, helping owners build the structure and discipline that catches optimism, anchoring, and groupthink before they're locked into an unrecoverable budget.
What is Governance Consulting
Governance consulting is the design and strengthening of the structures, stage-gate criteria, and review disciplines that determine whether a capital project advances based on genuine readiness rather than optimism, schedule pressure, or internal consensus. Every project carries some degree of bias into its front-end planning, that isn't a risk to disclose, it's a condition to manage. Teams that manage it well build structure into estimating, scope definition, and risk management, and require independent challenge rather than relying on experience alone.
Our Approach
Bias Pattern Assessment — identifying where optimism, anchoring, confirmation bias, or groupthink are shaping scope, estimates, or risk interpretation, patterns that individually feel reasonable but compound when left unchecked
Governance Framework Design — building or strengthening the stage-gate criteria, required documentation, and review protocols an organization uses to test whether a project is actually ready to advance
Independent Structural Intervention — introducing cold-eyes reviews, structured dissent protocols, and pre-mortem analysis, since bias is difficult to detect from inside a team no matter how much effort is applied
Decision Discipline — confirming five specific things before capital approval: estimate class aligned to scope maturity, documented scope maturity scoring at each gate, risk workshops beginning in FEL-1, independent estimate validation, and contingency set from quantified risk rather than convention
ROMAN's approach draws on documented, real-world project failures, remote logistics complexity discovered too late, immature technology advanced under schedule pressure, governance controls that failed to catch a trajectory until recovery was no longer viable, each one shaped by decisions made in front-end planning, not execution.
Built for Organizations Without a Formal Governance Model
Owners, developers, and EPC contractors without a documented stage-gate governance framework. Organizations whose gate reviews function as confirmation exercises rather than genuine tests of readiness. Capital committees that want structural, not just procedural, assurance that project bias is being managed.
Case Study
A mid-size owner had experienced two consecutive projects with unexplained cost growth discovered only after FID, in both cases, the root cause traced back to front-end assumptions that had never been independently challenged. ROMAN worked with the organization to design a stage-gate governance framework requiring documented PDRI scoring, independent estimate validation, and a mandatory cold-eyes review before each gate decision. On the next major project, the cold-eyes review surfaced an anchoring pattern, the team's cost estimate had barely moved despite significant scope growth since the original number was set eighteen months earlier. The gate was held, the estimate was rebuilt independently, and the organization avoided funding a project on a number that no longer reflected its actual scope.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is project bias, and why does it matter in governance?
A. Project bias refers to patterns, optimism, anchoring, confirmation bias, and groupthink, that shape front-end decisions in ways that feel reasonable at the time but go unchallenged. Because roughly 80% of a project's total cost is effectively committed during front-end planning, unmanaged bias becomes very expensive to correct later.
Q. Can bias really be eliminated through governance?
A. No. Bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed through structure, discipline, and independent challenge applied early, rather than left to individual judgment or team consensus alone.
Q. Does ROMAN replace our existing governance process?
A. No. ROMAN typically strengthens or right-sizes an existing framework, or helps design one where none exists, rather than replacing internal ownership of the governance function itself.
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