Program & Project Delivery Assurance
An independent read on whether a programme is where it says it is.
Independent assurance on the programmes that are too expensive to get wrong.
Advisory. A point-in-time review, stage-gate assurance, or a standing role through delivery.
Executives and boards funding a major programme, and the CIOs accountable for landing it.
Status has been amber for four months, a go-live date is being defended rather than planned, or the integrator's change requests have outgrown the original contract.
The practice
Health check
An independent read on scope, schedule, cost, risk and team, delivered to whoever is accountable — with the uncomfortable finding stated early rather than at the post-mortem.
Stage-gate assurance
Defined checkpoints with real entry and exit criteria, so a programme proceeds on evidence rather than on optimism and momentum.
Schedule and dependency review
Whether the plan is achievable: critical path, dependencies, resource assumptions, and the milestones quietly carrying all the risk.
Estimate and cost to complete
What it will actually take from here, including the contingency that has already been consumed and the work nobody has costed yet.
Vendor and integrator oversight
Holding the implementer to scope and contract deliverables, reviewing change requests, and sitting on your side of the table.
Testing and data readiness
Whether test coverage matches the risk, whether the migration has been rehearsed with real data, and what the defect trend actually implies.
Go-live readiness
Cutover plan, rollback, hypercare, training and support readiness — assessed against criteria agreed before anyone is under pressure to say yes.
Recovery
For programmes already in trouble: diagnosis, a replan that can be defended, and the difficult conversations that come with it.
Governance design
Steering committee composition, decision rights, reporting and RAID discipline, so issues surface while they are still cheap.
By the time it reaches the steering pack, it is expensive.
Assurance is a separate line of sight to whoever carries the consequence. That is the whole mechanism.
- 01Known on the team
The people doing the work can see the date will not hold. Nothing in the reporting line rewards saying so.
- 02Amber for a while
Status holds steady while the plan behind it stops changing and the work does not.
- 03Raised as a risk
Surfaced once contingency is already spent and the options have narrowed to bad ones.
- 04A reset
Scope cut, replanned, and explained to a board that thought it was on track last month.
We give the accountable executive an independent read on a programme: scope, schedule, cost, risk and readiness — with the finding delivered early enough to act on, and a replan where one is needed.
Status reporting is not assurance
Reporting comes from the team delivering the work, through a structure that rewards confidence. Assurance is a separate line of sight to whoever carries the consequence, which is why it works: the people who know the programme is in trouble usually tell someone who is not their reporting line first.
Dates defended rather than planned
A date nobody can explain the path to is the clearest signal available. The tell is not the milestone itself, it is that the plan behind it has stopped changing while the work has not.
Readiness is decided before the pressure arrives
Go-live criteria agreed weeks out, against defect trends, rehearsed migration, trained users and a tested rollback, produce a decision that can be made calmly. Criteria set in the go/no-go meeting itself are just the decision somebody already wanted.
Recovery is mostly sequencing
Troubled programmes rarely need a new methodology. They need scope cut to something achievable, dependencies re-sequenced, an honest cost to complete, and a governance forum that hears bad news early — plus, often, a conversation with the integrator that should have happened two quarters ago. The ETRM version of this work is described under programme assurance.
What you keep
The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means
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