14 It is welcome that the Authority and departments have taken so many positive steps to develop capability and provide greater assurance and it is clear that the Authority has carried out the activities that it was established to do. However, it has not set out clearly the outcomes those activities were designed to achieve, or how it would measure success. If its purpose was to improve the success rate of project delivery, it cannot yet prove that it has done so. It is also a cause of concern that so many projects are due to be delivered within this Parliament but have been initiated without any process to assess whether such a scale of delivery is achievable across government. Many of these predate the new arrangements for testing that early planning has been robust.
15 The three key challenges for the Authority and departments during this Parliament are to:
• prevent departments making firm commitments on cost and timescales for delivery before their plans have been properly tested;
• develop an effective mechanism whereby all major projects are prioritised according to strategic importance and capability is deployed to priority areas; and
• put in place the systems and data which allow proper performance measurement.