Chapter 20
Ten Things for Successful Project Assurance
In This Chapter
Making sure that you actually do assurance
Avoiding the list tickers and nit-pickers
Making assurance helpful and co-operative
Project Assurance is the audit function in a PRINCE2 project. Project Board members can do it themselves, or they can delegate the audit checks to other people, who then report back to the board members. You can read much more about Project Assurance in Chapter 12.
Project Assurance is a hugely neglected part of PRINCE2 (except where users of the method read PRINCE2 For Dummies and realise how important this audit function is). But Project Assurance really is a vital part, just as financial audit is a vital part of financial management. Here are ten tips for making Project Assurance work well.
Making Sure You Do It
Okay, telling you to ensure that you do Project Assurance may sound a bit basic, but actually I’m making a very important point. Project Assurance is probably the most neglected part of PRINCE2. Few organisations question the need for financial audit, but a great number don’t think they need to bother too much about ‘project audit’, even for large and expensive projects.
In many cases organisations neglect Project Assurance because they had unpleasant experiences of bad financial auditors (oh, all right then, lots of unpleasant experiences of lots of bad financial auditors) and they think that PRINCE2 auditing will be just as annoying. Financial audit can be very productive, but it often becomes an ordeal because of auditors who have a poor approach and even worse interpersonal skills. But this problem is bad news in financial audit, let alone within the management team of a PRINCE2 project.
The correct approach to Project Assurance is a co-operative one, which is rather like a colleague checking work for you. You really appreciate your colleague’s input and are grateful for any problems that she finds because then you can put them right.
The velvet glove contains a steel fist though, because Project Assurance is independent of the Project Manager and has a direct reporting line back to the Project Board to feed back what it finds. So if assurance staff find that the Project Manager is giving the Project Board incorrect or misleading information, they report it – and rightly so. But that’s an unlikely situation in the vast majority of projects.
The responsibility for making sure that Project Assurance is actually carried out lies firmly with the Project Board, and board members must not neglect this.
Being Flexible about Assurance
Project Assurance reflects the three PRINCE2 viewpoints of business, user, and supplier – see Chapter 12 for more on the viewpoints and how they fit with project roles. But delegation of assurance isn’t all or nothing. For example, the Senior Supplier may delegate supplier assurance to a specialist, while the Executive and Senior Supplier on the Project Board decide to do their own business and user assurance respectively.
Think carefully about the best approach for assurance in each particular project. Don’t get stuck in a rut with people saying, ‘This is how we always do assurance on our projects.’
Selecting Experienced People
For effective Project Assurance you need to choose people who
Understand projects
Understand PRINCE2 properly – as a flexible and adaptable method, not as some bureaucratic beast that they found out about on some inadequate training course run by people who don’t understand it properly either, or from misunderstanding the PRINCE2 manual
Know the common problem areas and where things can go wrong
Know what to look for – the tell-tale signs of problems
Don’t use inexperienced people who can only say, ‘Well, it all looks fine to me, but actually this is the first time I’ve ever seen one of these.’ Or worse still, ‘Well, the PRINCE2 manual says . . .’
If you’re really stuck for people inside your organisation, you can hire in experienced people from outside. But then make sure that those external consultants do what you want, and only what you want, and don’t set up assurance as some small industry. And make quite sure that the people you use understand PRINCE2 properly too (back to avoiding bureaucracy) or they can push you down the road of too much paperwork and an inflexible implementation of PRINCE2.
Avoiding List Tickers
Those doing assurance need to check things thoroughly, not bounce off at a superficial level. For example, assurance staff must make sure that the right people quality-checked a product to the right standard. They don’t just check to see whether a control document has merely been signed.
The focus needs to be clearly on making sure that things have been done as planned for the project, not just getting some boxes ticked off on a check sheet. Beware: Those who don’t understand the method and think it’s all about documentation can turn this powerful project method into a list ticker’s paradise – and at the cost of very high project overheads.
Steering Clear of Nit-Pickers
Project Assurance is co-operative and helpful – and not about looking for trouble and causing project delays by making small problems seem unduly important. The project has enough to do without getting sidetracked on unimportant trivia picked up by nit-pickers.
Working Co-operatively
Do brief your Project and Team Managers to work co-operatively with assurance staff. And explain that Project Assurance is like having something checked over by an experienced colleague – something to be welcomed as part of the Project Management Team.
Separating Assurance and Support
Don’t give Project Support staff the responsibility for assurance. Project Assurance must be independent, whereas Project Support gets involved in the actual work. If you’re not quite convinced, just think of finance. You don’t have people helping write the accounts and then the same people checking them. That undermines the audit because these people aren’t impartial. Those doing Project Support are there to help Project Managers, not to check up on them, and combining the two areas makes for a very unhappy as well as completely ineffective relationship.
Being Careful When Using Other Project Managers
Some organisations get Project Managers to do Project Assurance on each other’s projects. Doing this can work, but be careful because it can go badly wrong: ‘She made my life terrible on my last project. Right, now I can get my own back on her project!’
Getting Project Board Ownership
If dedicated Project Assurance staff do the assurance work, make sure that the Project Board members fully understand that they’re still responsible for the correct running of the project. Project Assurance staff do the work on the board’s behalf, but they aren’t ultimately responsible for assurance. To go back to the financial audit example, a finance director remains responsible for the quality of organisational accounting, even though other people do financial auditing and report back to the director.
Following on from this, also make sure that dedicated assurance staff communicate well with respective Project Board members, both to determine what the assurance staff must check and then to talk through what they find and what they need to follow up.
Where you do delegate Project Assurance, remember that assurance staff aren’t Project Board members. Don’t expect them to attend Project Board meetings. Instead, have Project Board members pick up and deal with any assurance issues well in advance of any Project Board meeting.
Being Clear on What You’re Assuring
To get assurance right, you need to think through each project very carefully to decide what you need to audit and what you don’t. Remember that Project Assurance takes time and also takes project staff (such as the Project Manager and Team Managers) off their work for a while. The Project Board members, who either do the checking or ask others to do it on their behalf, need to strike a balance here.
Do this thinking and decision making in the main project planning stage, the Initiation Stage, after the Project Plan itself is in place and you have some detail to work with.