What Project Assurance Should Actually Do: The Ultimate Checklist
Project assurance can feel like an unnecessary tick box exercise; writing reports no one reads, meeting arbitrary compliance check points, and taking you away from the real work.
But it doesn’t need to feel that way.
Project assurance can provide regular, evidence-based checks that your project is moving forward and continuing to be aligned with organisational goals. It identifies risks and challenges early, giving you the chance to tackle them before they become much bigger issues. It helps your Project Manager and Sponsor make better, informed decisions, and gives your stakeholders confidence in the delivery of the project. True project assurance will be a part of plan and won’t slow work down.
So, how do you make project assurance work for you?
Our ultimate checklist gives you the structure to apply practical project assurance into your work:
1. Check your governance
Roles and responsibilities are essential to project delivery. Without effective and accountable decision making, the project can lose momentum, and with it, stakeholder confidence. Check that you have a solid governance structure, and that those making the decisions understand what is expected of them. Decisions need to be logged, and progress reported on regularly to stakeholders. Trust is built on having stable project foundations, and having a clear understanding about who is accountable vs responsible for the delivery of the project can deliver real benefit.
2. Ensure project health
Regularly review your risks, issues and project plans. Keeping your eye on the ball of these moving parts can stop small problems snowballing into big issues. Identify if your project plan is still viable, where can you have flexibility and where are your hard deadlines? Making sure your team are following the most up to date plan, and flagging to you any delays or issues on their end is crucial.
3. Review resource and capability
Having the right people, in the right place, at the right time, can make all the difference to your project delivery. Check the roles you’re carrying at each phase of the project, you may need a different skill set further down the road. Where you need to make changes or add resource, don’t leave it to the last minute, as it could be too late to keep to your critical path.
4. Assess methods and controls
Check that your project management processes are fit for purpose and being followed. Are your logs and trackers being kept up to date? This might include cost estimating, risk assessments, communications logs and change management planning. If these documents have fallen to the wayside, then its likely your team are not keeping up with the chosen methodology, and you may find the project is off track, or that risks are not being mitigated.
5. Understand dependencies and external factors
All projects have interdependencies and external factors that need to be taken into consideration. Think about any third parties you might need to be checking in with, these could be suppliers, or other teams or departments. The success of your project could lie in the hands of someone you hardly speak to. Make sure you’re keeping in regular communication with them, speak to them about their risks, priorities, and timelines. A successful relationship with third parties can be making of your project delivery.
These 5 activities should provide the basics for implementing project assurance into your project. Although assurance is often an independent function, it should be embedded into the mind of your whole team and woven into the very fabric of your project. It can also be managed by a Project Management Office (PMO) for projects, programmes and portfolios.
Team members need a safe space to raise issues and ask questions, which ultimately supports project assurance success. You could make project assurance a part of your weekly stand-up meeting, using the regular check-in to address risks as they arrive.
Start by setting up a project health check – ask the team to score where they are against these 5 checklist areas by rating them on a scale of 1 to 5. Any area that scores under a 4, prioritise and act. For any area that scores 4 and over, check that this is accurate. Ask yourself, ‘what can be done to get us to a 5?’ It is very rare for projects to score perfect 5s across the board, but this pragmatic assurance approach can get you to the key areas fast. Alternatively, using negative idea generation can help you identify what not to do! Asking ‘what would make the worst project assurance?’ and then making sure you do the opposite.
By making time, asking questions, listening and testing, you can work with your delivery teams to make positive changes enabling you to deliver critical projects and maximise benefits for your organisation.
For more information about project, programme or portfolio assurance, contact us.
You might also like to read our thoughts on Five essential capabilities enabled by transformation programme assurance.
