Global Programme Assurance

The Client Problem

A technology enabled business transformation programme had been established to drive the:

• harmonisation of business operations and processes across the Global Business
• retire and consolidate legacy systems
• improve visibility of business metrics
• allowing better decisions-making and increased margin.

The client needed independent, objective, pragmatic and experience-based advice on the significant programme delivery risks presented by this complex programme and how these risks may be mitigated to improve delivery confidence.

This was packaged as a Quality Assurance service, providing the leadership and subject matter expertise to shape, manage and deliver a quarterly review of the programme. The Quality Assurance service was required to engage closely with key stakeholders and sponsors throughout the assurance review in order to validate, agree and action any key findings identified.

What we did

We provided a Quality Assurance leadership service that was focused on, but not limited to, the following: ​

• Providing hands-on leadership, direction, subject matter expertise and execution management
• Developing and agreeing the scope and plan for the review, working closely with the Program Director, Global Quality Partner, key programme stakeholders and sponsors
• Identifying any requirements for additional subject matter expertise to complete the review and work with internal sourcing teams to agree and acquire the necessary resources
• Managing the review activity, providing proactive oversight, challenge and intervention; driving progress and rapidly surfacing and validating any significant findings with the appropriate stakeholders
• Developing pragmatic, actionable remediation recommendations with agreed owner(s) for each finding
• Providing weekly summary level executive reporting on the findings, strengths, risks, and any recommended remediation requirements key programme stakeholders
• Outlining the expected evidence that should be available and reviewed to validate that each finding has been effectively delivered and embedded
• Developing and presenting a final Quality Assurance report to key programme stakeholders

How we did it

The PiC team quickly engaged with the key stakeholders to understand their concerns and suggested areas of focus while using our experience to also test and challenge programme maturity in critical areas. From these sessions a consolidated view of scope was created and iterated with the stakeholders to get down to an achievable and realistic scope that would target key risk areas while also providing feedback in a timely manner.

Alongside finalising the review scope, the PiC team rapidly built trust with the key programme delivery leads by demonstrating large scale programme delivery credibility and agreeing pragmatic ways of working for the review that would minimise the impact on their teams while allowing them to say close, ensure any findings were accurately represented and collaboratively agree appropriate, actionable remediation, owners and timescales.

The assurance was delivered through a combination of documentation review, interviews and observation during management and governance meetings. The documentation review enabled the PiC team to gain a good understanding of key programme areas which helped focus the interviews and make best use of the stakeholder’s precious time.

Short, twice weekly, review feedback sessions were established with key stakeholders and delivery leads to continuously validate the PiC team’s understanding, emerging findings and proposed remediation. This enabled the programme team to rapidly address any risks in parallel with completing the review.

Results and Learnings

Having a clearly defined assurance review scope, that had the input and backing of key stakeholders proved critical on this complex Global programme. The scope enabled the PiC team to focus on the most significant areas of concern and provided a clear sponsor led context for the review to the programme deliver teams.

Considerable effort was put in up front to rationalise the scope and agree a pragmatic approach for the review. This was critically important as it ensured that all expectations were aligned, the scope was realistic and achievable and that the key risks would be surfaced in a timely manner.

The short weekly review feedback sessions with key sponsors and delivery leads proved critical to success. These sessions facilitated rich discussion of the key risk areas and enabled the formulation of rapid, pragmatic, actionable and timely risk remediation.