Project Assurance
Have you found yourself committed to funding rework, additional activities, fire-fighting unanticipated risks and struggling to cope with an overwhelming pace of requirements change?
This is because projects frequently fail incrementally and seemingly invisibly. Problems accumulate over time, gradually eroding performance to critically low levels. All too often, the realisation that a project is in trouble sets in too late for us to take effective action.
One effective solution is Project Assurance. This is a regular review (e.g. monthly) to give confidence to the project sponsor or project board that the project is going to plan. Project Assurance assesses the project environment at key points. This assessment is carried out by interviews and reviews of key documents.
Project Assurance is designed to provide your senior management with confidence that the project environment has been successfully established and is maintained throughout the project life-cycle.
- We look at the project from several different perspectives by interviewing people who have an interest or involvement in this phase of the project - e.g. business managers, users, project managers etc;
- We check on the development and maintenance of plans, progress against plans, how the project is reported, how risks are being assessed and managed, how good is the communication and collaboration within the project team, and between the project team and the business or environment;
- We also look at how much pressure for change there is, and how change is controlled;
- We use the information collected to anticipate future problems for the project, and to assess whether there needs to be any adjustment to the project now to ensure future problems can be dealt with effectively.