An office without an agreed mandate spends its first year negotiating one.
Get the mandate written and signed before the first hire or the first meeting.
Unstated authority is tested constantly, and the office loses most of those tests.
Publish what the office decides, what it recommends, and what it cannot touch.
Govern everything and you govern nothing. The unit is what makes the remit real.
Name the work types in scope, and put the rest out of scope in writing.
Work admitted before conditions exist becomes precedent, and precedent is hard to withdraw.
Write the entry conditions before accepting the first request.
Work admitted into spreadsheets and email can never be reconciled later.
Pick the system of record and require entry through it from the first item.
Retrofitting evidence requirements produces cleanup theater instead of proof.
Define what evidence each work type must produce, before anything is delivered.
Offices that defer the first read spend years reporting on a system nobody has examined.
Put the first actual-state read in the calendar within the first quarter.
Reporting built for visibility grows without limit and decides nothing.
For each report, name the decision it supports. Kill the ones with no answer.
A permanent office becomes a layer. A named exit keeps it a capability.
State what must be true for the office to hand its function back to the business.
An assessment tells you how wide. Foundation teaches your people to close them without buying the read again.