Project initiation support and assurance
There is increasing pressure on organisations to deliver business critical projects and programmes within shorter timeframes, under greater stakeholder scrutiny, and with tighter financial constraints. Many projects and programmes fail to meet these pressures and take on too much risk. From our experience, this often stems from poor project or programme initiation and because there is no assurance.
A more structured and considered approach from the beginning will help you navigate programmes that your organisation hasn’t attempted before and when the requirements are vague or undecided. It will help you set a clear strategy when you have multiple sponsors and varied stakeholders with differing requirements.
When you are investing in considerable financial and human resources, having assurance from the outset gives all parties involved the confidence that you will deliver the target outcomes and benefits.
Smart assurance for projects and programmes
To support decision-making throughout major change initiatives, senior managers should know:
- how each project contributes to strategic objectives;
- the likelihood of achieving the expected benefits;
- the remaining cost of each project;
- the earliest and latest completion time for each project;
- total exposure to risk;
- resource capacity; and
- the impact that cancelling, deferring, slowing down, or accelerating a project can have on the strategic objectives.
Our team can provide an independent view of all these key areas of your project, providing comfort to your wider audience and supporting any progress that has already been made. Using our pragmatic approach, we can identify risks that your teams focused on delivery may have missed.
If you have a Project Management Office (PMO), we can also help to establish or improve its assurance capability, develop an approach to integrated assurance and approval planning, or simply provide an additional independent view.
No matter which kind of support you need, we use our Smart Assurance approach to assess:
- whether your organisation is ‘fit for change’;
- how the project/programme is set up to deliver change; and
- the suite of controls to ensure the project/programme objectives are fully realised.
Project initiation support
We helped develop the Project Initiation Routemap on behalf of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA). This Routemap helps address delivery and governance challenges by offering support on strategic decision-making during project initiation. This is based on the latest thinking and knowledge that we acquired through helping clients deliver major projects.
Before your project even begins, we can boost your organisation’s capability to deliver projects, giving you and your stakeholders confidence that you are prepared for change. Using the Project Initiation Routemap, we will assess the capability of key members in your delivery team against the relative complexity of the project or programme. This process allows us to identify the complexity-capability gaps and provide tailored recommendations to close them for a more successful outcome.
Contact Walter Akers to discuss how assurance and project initiation support can add value and insight to enhance your change management efficiency.
