Overview

Good assurance provides an independent assessment of whether the elements fundamental to successful project delivery are in place and operating effectively. In itself assurance does not deliver a project, but it can identify and help mitigate any risks to successful delivery present in a project's sponsorship, business case and benefits plan, governance and reporting arrangements, contracting and supply chain strategies, commercial and delivery skills, funding and resourcing and overall project management approach.

Assurance provides information to those that sponsor, govern and manage a project to help them make better informed decisions which reduce the causes of project failure, promote the conditions for success and increase the chance of delivering the required outcome cost-effectively. It helps ensure the disciplines around delivering projects are followed and highlights where they have not been.

Central government's high risk projects are frequently large scale, innovative and reliant on complex relationships between diverse stakeholders. Such projects often present a level of risk that no commercial organisation would consider taking on and our previous work indicates that projects can fail to deliver as planned to time, cost and quality. In this context an enhanced control environment is a sensible way of reducing the financial risk to the public purse and increasing the chance of achieving value for money for the taxpayer.

Over the past decade the introduction of independent assurance such as the Gateway™ process, the Major Projects Review Group, Starting Gate and Assurance of Action Plans has improved significantly the control environment around high risk projects. We support this achievement while noting the impact of constraints on how assurance currently operates, most notably the lack of a clearly stated and enforceable mandate.

In our view central government now needs to build on these successes by ensuring that the system of assurance:

● has a clear mandate;

● is non-optional;

● is outcome focused;

● is built on a higher and more exacting evidence base;

● triggers further interventions where necessary;

● is integrated across all mechanisms;

● provides the ability to plan and resource assurance activity;

● systematically propagates lessons learned; and

● minimises the burden placed on projects.