In project management, establishing an operational committee (COMOP) or a steering committee (COPIL) is an organizational strategy. It forms a pillar for the IT services company (DSC). For a manager, neglecting the COMOP is like moving forward blindly, without control over deadlines, costs, or quality.
What is the Role of the Operational Committee?
An operational committee is not just a group of people gathered around a table to exchange information. It is a governing body responsible for bridging the gap between strategy (often defined by a steering committee or general management) and on-the-ground reality.
Its primary role is to ensure the execution of decisions. To do this, it plans, monitors, and adjusts actions based on expected results. While the steering committee validates the directions, the operational committee orchestrates their implementation. For example, in a digital agency or an DSC, the launch of a new offering primarily goes through the COPIL to define the roadmap and budget for better financial control. For its part, the operational committee will ensure that each stage (development, communication, team training) adheres to this framework and progresses at the right pace.
It is a dynamic body that requires pragmatism. It does not seek to redefine the strategy, but to give it substance.
Why Has the COMOP Become Essential?
Why formalize a COMOP? Isn’t it enough to gather project managers when necessary? The answer is clear: in a context where projects fail due to a lack of structured operational follow-up, the absence of a dedicated committee can impact the agency’s profitability and costs. These can be 14 times higher than in a company that has mastered project management, according to a report from – Pulse of the Profession.
The operational committee addresses several concrete needs:
- Coordinate multidisciplinary teams, sometimes spread across different sites or departments.
- Streamline communication, avoiding information silos that hinder progress.
- React quickly to unforeseen events, as a decision made within 48 hours can save weeks of delay.
- Provide visibility to management, without overwhelming strategic leaders with daily details.
- Ensure project progress while respecting deadlines and costs.
Without this tool, each project manager operates with their own method, and the risk of inconsistency increases.
The Importance of a Well-Structured Operational Committee
Creating an operational committee is not just about appointing a few people and sending out meeting invitations. Its effectiveness directly impacts:
- Adherence to deadlines and budgets: close monitoring allows for identifying deviations as soon as they appear.
- Optimization of human and material resources: better distribution of workloads, adjustment of schedules, and avoidance of overloading key teams.
- The quality of deliverables: each control point is an opportunity to correct issues before the client suffers the consequences.
- Client satisfaction and loyalty: a project delivered smoothly is often the best sales argument to secure another.
These stakes in project management are even more crucial in competitive environments, where every delay or organizational flaw can cost contracts.
How to Make an Operational Committee Effective?
Here’s the challenging question: how to prevent this committee from becoming yet another time-consuming meeting with no impact? The key lies in a few simple, yet often overlooked, principles.
First, define a clear objective for each session. A committee is not intended to address all topics, but to focus on the progress of defined actions. Next, choose relevant members. The COMOP can consist of the director, managers, project managers, experts (from all hierarchical levels), and financial or human resources representatives.
The frequency of meetings should be adapted to the nature of the project: weekly for an intense deployment phase, monthly for a long-term project. Collaborative tools are also a powerful lever: a shared dashboard or project management software allows for real-time progress tracking and avoids lengthy reports.
Managing Actions: Advantages of an All-in-One Management Tool
The effectiveness of an operational committee largely depends on its ability to have reliable and up-to-date information to manage ongoing projects and actions. By integrating a management tool such as Furious, the COMOP gains real-time visibility into project progress, resource allocation, and adherence to deadlines.
Predictive dashboards, automatic alerts, and the centralization of data and commercial operations, financial, and HR data allow for anticipating deviations and adjusting priorities without waiting for monthly reports. Thus, the operational committee transforms its meetings into true decision-making levers, gains reactivity, and optimizes the overall performance of teams while reducing information loss associated with dispersed tools.
What's truly Furious for me is the all-in-one aspect: everything is centralized. We can manage finance, project management, and team utilization rates with a single tool, which avoids using several. It was exactly what we were looking for.
Measuring the Effectiveness of a COMOP: KPIs to Track
An operational committee that measures nothing is a bit like flying blind: you’re moving forward… but where to? To evaluate the performance of a COMOP, indicators must reflect the reality on the ground, not just the project’s budgetary snapshot. Beyond traditional progress tracking and consumed vs. planned budget, it is recommended to track:
- Budget variance and remaining work: useful for anticipating deviations rather than suffering them.
- Deliverable validation rate: an unvalidated deliverable is a latent risk for final delivery.
- Risk management capacity: number of risks identified and addressed before they become incidents.
- Adherence to contractual commitments (SLA): monitoring of commitments made with the client in terms of service, performance, and responsiveness.
- Average workload per employee and its evolution
In practice, the goal is not to multiply KPIs, but to choose 5 to 7 readable key indicators, updated before each committee. Better a concise dashboard that truly alerts, than a complex system where you end up not looking at anything.
The KPI I prioritize [with Furious] is profit margin. It allows me to ensure that we don't exceed the time allocated on quotes. If we exceed it, I either discuss it with the client or adjust the next quote to avoid making the same mistake. The profit margin KPI is truly essential for us.
Pitfalls to Avoid in Project Management
Some errors are recurrent and deserve to be anticipated:
- Multiplying meetings without a concrete objective, which exhausts participants and dilutes the impact.
- Confusing COMOP and CODIR (management committee) by addressing strategic decisions in the wrong place.
- Allowing the initiative to die out due to lack of follow-up, which turns the approach into an empty shell.
- Neglecting communication with field teams, who may perceive the committee as a bureaucratic body rather than a lever for action.
These pitfalls are not inevitable: they can be corrected with discipline and a true internal sponsor.
The operational committee is an insurance against project deviations. It is not a heavy structure, but a space for action and regulation, which makes the difference between a brilliant plan and successful execution.
Ask yourself: are your projects progressing with the fluidity and control you expect? If the answer is “not always,” it might be time to structure (or revitalize) your operational committee. After all, it’s better to invest one well-structured hour each week than to spend three months catching up on deviations.
You might be Asking Yourself these Questions?
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