The delivery workforce reported governance and control weaknesses across all 150 engagements. The central problem was the operation of controls in shared agentic work: authority, change management, human review, and evidence did not consistently provide the assurance their formal arrangements implied. The governance, oversight, and control score combines 47 related indicator ratings. Lower scores were associated with cancellation, manual correction, and limited visibility of that work. The mean score was 2.58 on canceled engagements and 4.86 on active engagements. These findings connect operational control with engagement performance, while leaving causal direction unresolved.
Part 3 examines how indicators, engagement characteristics, and reported practices relate to governance, oversight, and control. It draws on 37,472 ratings of 47 governance-related indicators from 850 respondents, together with reporting and obligations items and written accounts. The 3,330 written instances classified as governance weaknesses occur among 6,862 answers concerning respondents' own engagements. They identify reported deficiencies and bypassed controls, not independently verified failure of every engagement. The analysis considers both broad patterns in the score and specific control gaps that a composite mean may not sharply distinguish.
The evidence principally records the vendor delivery workforce's experience at one observation. It cannot establish the sequence of events or identify causal effects. The 56 canceled engagements had already been canceled when respondents answered, making comparisons with the 94 active engagements retrospective. Two customer management executives are included among the 850 respondents, but they do not provide a corresponding evidence base from financial institution staff. Relationships among measures from the same respondents also share that source limitation.
What we did was stop using the change board for anything that mattered. It met fortnightly and the agents moved faster than that, so we built a parallel list, one sheet, updated every evening, of every case where the model had done something we had not agreed to and what we had done about it. Their underwriting lead and I read it at nine each morning and cleared it between us, and whatever survived that went to the formal forum a fortnight later as a note rather than a decision. It worked, in the sense that files kept moving. It also means the actual governance of this engagement was two people and a spreadsheet. Nobody asked us to do it and nobody stopped us, which I think tells you where the accountability sat.”
ENGAGEMENT MANAGER · BPO, Credit, underwriting and suitability