Your anxiety
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Your change portfolio, or key individual programmes within it are mission critical, high-risk and high-profile, but are also under significant time and cost pressure. Your organisation is experienced at programme delivery but has not previously handled anything this complex, critical, or sensitive and you:
- Lack clear and reliable visibility of how programmes are performing
- Worry that bad news is being filtered out as it rises through the organisation or is being drowned in volumes of data; and
- Are uncertain as to whether best practice is being shared enabling optimal benefits to be delivered.
As the accountable owner, you need independent assurance that your portfolio and programmes are in good health. You have neither the time nor the experience, however, to provide yourself with the reassurance you seek.
How we can help you
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Our approach is to set-up a small team to provide independent, outcome focused, and constructive assurance directly to those who are accountable for programme success. Designed to fit our clients' organisation and governance arrangements, and the scale and scope of their delivery portfolio, typical outline steps are:
- The portfolio is prioritised by inherent risk which includes the PR risk, as well as traditional delivery and cost risk. This provides a more sophisticated mechanism than simple project spend and allows focus of management effort on high impact projects.
- Independent (of delivery team and line management) reviews of the high impact programmes (e.g. independent third party technical reviews, peer reviews etc.)
- An objective 'health check' for key programmes and constituent projects by examining and reporting on vital signs ranging from governance to reporting processes.
- Synthesis of review results with regular management reports to provide an independent commentary on the portfolio or programme.
- The commentary report is fed into appropriate governance and management forums for action.
How we would work with you
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We typically establish a joint team and work with our clients to implement portfolio assurance. The first stage of assuring a portfolio would be to agree an assurance approach that met the needs of senior managers in the business and the owners of constituent programmes. We would then introduce it progressively across all the programmes to be assured, adopting a 'challenge and support' posture designed to promote learning, share good ideas across other programmes in the portfolio and attempt to reduce/remove poor practice. This promotes a constructive working relationship between the assurance review team and programme teams and encourages owners of programmes to regard assurance as a beneficial dimension of support, rather than audits simply there to inspect progress and report elsewhere. Finally we produce a written report with observations and recommendations which apply both to the specific programme assured and more broadly to others in the organisation.
Throughout, our consultants maintain close links with the programme owners for whom they are undertaking the assurance review, ideally sharing findings progressively rather than in a single disclosure.
Tools and training we can provide you
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While setting up and embedding the assurance function we aim to coach your team in maintaining the 'challenge and support' balance, transferring skills to both the assurance team and also to senior management recipients to ensure they know best how to use assurance information. Our risk categorisation tool, and independent review templates enable a running start to setting up the assurance function.
We have a full suite of diagnostic tools and techniques covering all key aspects of programme health including leadership, planning and control, governance, risk and issue management, stakeholder engagement, benefits realisation etc. We also have access to programme management best practice benchmarking data for organisations in a range of sectors.
How this could deliver value for you
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Whether to seek independent assurance is typically a choice rather than an essential pre-requisite for programme success. The value, however, of improved visibility for those in key ownership roles should not be under-estimated. Frequently our programme assurance reviews have led to step change improvements in delivery success as well as enhanced external stakeholder perception of our client organisations' ability to deliver. This has often led to real financial savings, for example as a result of improved capital re-financing rates (e.g. lenders assuaged that robust management controls are in place).
Our portfolio assurance methodology delivers real value by ensuring that finite management and external validation resource is focused on mission critical projects. Independent assurance reports are delivered in an easy-to-digest format for senior management and external stakeholder reading. These reports can be used as a third-party 'pressure test' as to whether critical projects are on track for successful outcome – recognising that project progress reports can occasionally suffer from a self-generated, optimism bias. The reports, and ensuing facilitated discussion, ensure that senior management are focused on the strategic issues required to address any opportunities for portfolio-level, systemic improvement.