Published
‘Assurance needs to be closer to the project and progressive. More like an ongoing partnership than just formal gate reviews.’
Tony Robins, Head of P3M Assurance, Network Rail
Like most things in life, what you get from your project assurance will depend on what you put into it. It’s never easy to hear critical feedback, particularly if you have a great deal invested in a project or you are already feeling stressed by the cracks that are appearing but if you take the time to build a relationship with your assurers, so that you understand them and they understand you, then you’ll find it easier to step out from behind your defenses and look at the project through their eyes.
And if organizations can view assurance as an integral part of the delivery process, rather than an obstacle to get past or a watchdog to divert, then it makes it easier to build time into the process for sense-checking what you are doing and adjusting or (if necessary), pausing or even stopping.
If we use an analogy, imagine your project is a wire-guided missile that you have fired at a drone. Clearly the drone will have moved the moment you launch the missile and that movement may not necessarily be linear. Your wire-guidance allows you to adjust the missile’s flight in response to what’s happening with the target. What is that system translated into the world of projects but the process of assurance?
As with any technical aspect of project delivery, assurance requires a specific set of competencies, involving judgement, interpretation, negotiation and these are skills that benefit hugely from practice, particularly when those people involved are not full-time assurers. Defining and developing those competencies will improve the performance of your assurance and increase the confidence in your assurers; improvements which will enable you to tackle more complex or riskier projects.
The simple message is: the better you get at assurance, the better assurance will help your projects.
Read the Highlights Report: Assurance 2030 – Creating a Project Assurance Profession
During the seminar, we asked delegates three key questions about the assurance function – we’d love to hear your take on these questions so we have set them up as a Mentimeter poll. Please do follow the link and let us have your answers.