Assurance 2030 – Creating a Project Assurance Profession

Assurance in projects has been around for a long time. However, it’s traditionally been fragmented, with specific aspects of a project (e.g. technical, safety and quality) being assured by specialists in those areas somewhat in isolation from each other. Furthermore, those specialists typically do not see themselves as project professionals; they are quality assurers, internal auditors, etc, probably as interested in non-project activities as they are in project ones, and subject to ways of working and reporting lines that lie outside of project management.

Integrated Assurance approaches have been an attempt to bring together these disparate assurance providers into single frameworks, but with only limited success. Who has the responsibility to make an integrated assurance work for a project? And who actually has the required authority? Who ‘owns’ project assurance as a whole?

What has been emerging in recent years is a breed of project professionals whose sole job is to provide integrated assurance on a project – or more typically a number of projects. They may originate from more specialised areas of assurance, or from specific delivery roles, but now their perspective is different: it is now the success of the entire project that they’re interested in, not just specific aspects.

Whereas quality assurance, safety assurance, internal audit and other project professionals have their own standards, competency frameworks, communities of practice, etc, wheere does the project assurance professional turn for those things? How can an organisation ensure that its project assurance people have the right skills and experience?

The challenge for this seminar is to identify what is needed to ensure that project assurance is provided efficiently and effectively by competent people following robust and effective processes against robust known standards.

In short, how do we create a project assurance profession?