Embedding Project Assurance

Effective project assurance is not a one-time review but an integral part of the entire project lifecycle. Each phase presents distinct quality risks and assurance needs, requiring structured oversight to maintain standards, prevent avoidable rework, and ensure project outcomes meet organisational expectations.

At each stage, the Project Assurance Manager plays a key role in defining quality measures, monitoring adherence, and addressing risks—ensuring that assurance is proactive rather than reactive.

Establishing the Foundation for Quality

The Project Assurance Manager is appointed at the start of the project to establish a structured approach to quality management. This phase ensures clear governance, defined roles, and risk visibility. Key activities include:

• Developing a tailored project delivery model to align with the project’s complexity and objectives. 
• Creating a project organisational structure with clear roles and accountabilities.
• Defining roles, deliverables, and required skills to support execution.
• Identifying and customising technology enablers that support project delivery.
• Defining quality governance structures, including escalation paths and reporting mechanisms. 
• Conducting an independent risk assessment to identify potential quality risks early.
• Embedding project assurance into project plans from the outset.

Defining Quality Measures and Controls

During planning, the Project Assurance Manager refines assurance strategies to ensure quality is built into delivery. This phase sets clear expectations for quality, team structure, and project oversight. Key activities include:

• Defining entry and exit criteria for each project phase to identify and escalate quality risks.
• Establishing baseline quality measures for deliverables to maintain consistency.
• Setting team guiding principles to promote collaboration.
• Developing detailed role definitions to support targeted recruitment.
• Participating in the selection of project resources, ensuring skills align with project needs.  

Ensuring Proactive Quality Oversight

Once the project is underway, the Project Assurance Manager ensures that quality processes are applied and emerging risks are escalated. This phase ensures that final deliverables meet the agreed standards and that quality improvements are carried forward. Key activities include:

• Ensuring teams follow defined delivery models and processes.
• Supporting the use of project enablers and adjusting them as required.
• Participating in ongoing recruitment to ensure resource suitability throughout the project.

Independent Oversight and Risk Escalation

Continuous monitoring ensures that quality standards are upheld and risks are identified and escalated. The Project Assurance Manager provides independent oversight, ensuring that quality remains a priority and that objective assessments inform decision-making. Key activities include:

• Assessing delivered outputs against quality expectations.
• Reviewing resource suitability based on actual performance and delivered outputs.
• Coordinating independent project health checks at key milestones.
• Providing regular quality status reports to maintain transparency.

Ensuring Quality Completion and Lessons Learned

At project closure, the Project Assurance Manager verifies that all quality expectations have been met and that key lessons are recorded for future projects. This phase ensures final deliverables meet agreed standards and that quality improvements are carried forward. Key activities include:

• Conducting a review of the delivered product against agreed quality standards.
• Evaluating project outcomes against the original assurance plan.
• Capturing insights from assurance interventions to strengthen enterprise-wide quality frameworks. 
• Leading post-project assurance reviews to refine methodologies for future projects.
• Documenting lessons learned to improve project assurance practices across future initiatives. 

Role of Project Assurance in Governance

Project governance structures rely on reporting from the Project Manager, creating a risk where quality concerns are deprioritised in favour of schedule or budget constraints. The Project Assurance Manager provides an independent perspective, ensuring that quality remains central to decision-making.

In steering committee discussions, the Project Assurance Manager presents unbiased assessments of project health, highlighting quality risks and recommending corrective actions. Unlike project reports that may focus on milestone progress, independent assurance reporting ensures that governance bodies receive an accurate view of quality challenges and their impact on overall project viability.

By integrating project assurance into governance, organisations improve transparency, strengthen risk management, and reduce the likelihood of late-stage project failures caused by unresolved quality issues. Executive oversight benefits from data-driven insights that prioritise long-term project stability over short-term delivery pressures.

Project Assurance in Waterfall vs. Agile Projects

Enterprise IT projects are suited to varied delivery models depending on their size, type, and complexity. The Project Assurance Manager adapts quality oversight based on whether a project is delivered using a Waterfall or Agile model.

In Waterfall projects, structured phases guide when quality assessments occur. The Project Assurance Manager aligns assurance activities with these phases, conducting milestone reviews to assess whether requirements, designs, and deliverables meet agreed quality expectations. Identified risks and issues are escalated to the appropriate governance body, ensuring that decision-makers with broader strategic interests beyond project delivery remain informed.

In Agile projects, project assurance can be aligned with sprints, embedding quality oversight throughout iterative development. The Project Assurance Manager checks that quality controls—such as code reviews, automated testing, and sprint-based assessments—are consistently applied. While Agile allows flexibility, inconsistencies can arise without structured oversight. By integrating project assurance, Agile projects maintain alignment with enterprise quality expectations while retaining adaptability.

Regardless of the delivery model, the Project Assurance Manager provides governance visibility on quality-related risks and issues, ensuring they are considered at the appropriate level.

Integrating Assurance into Vendor Engagement

Enterprise IT projects often involve external vendors, making it critical to ensure that procurement documents and requirements are aligned with enterprise needs. The Project Assurance Manager plays a key role in strengthening vendor engagement by ensuring that key procurement documents—such as the request for proposal (RFP) and supporting artefacts—are clear, complete, and aligned with enterprise architecture, gap analysis, and defined business and technical requirements.

Before vendor selection, the Project Assurance Manager reviews procurement documents to confirm that they:

• Are supported by enterprise architecture and business requirements.
• Address identified gaps to prevent misalignment between vendor solutions and project objectives.
• Define clear quality expectations and acceptance criteria. 

During execution, the Project Assurance Manager maintains visibility over vendor deliverables—not to dictate vendor activities but to ensure alignment with project objectives and enterprise standards. Key activities include:

• Checking that vendor deliverables meet the agreed requirements and quality criteria.
• Raising risks where vendor outputs could impact project integration, operational stability, or long-term maintainability.
• Ensuring that contractual acceptance criteria are met before deliverables are accepted. 

By embedding project assurance into both procurement and execution, the Project Assurance Manager helps mitigate risks related to unclear requirements, inadequate solution fit, and long-term operational challenges. This ensures that vendors are selected based on well-defined expectations and that their deliverables integrate seamlessly into the enterprise environment.

Incorporating Quality Oversight in Change Control

The impact of scope change in enterprise IT projects is not limited to time and budget. The Project Assurance Manager ensures that scope changes are assessed for quality impact before approval. Their role in the change control process includes:

1. Initial change assessment: Reviewing change requests to determine potential quality implications, ensuring they align with project objectives and enterprise standards.
2. Impact analysis: Evaluating how the change affects deliverable integrity, resource availability, and required skills.
3. Quality review: Confirming that appropriate quality measures (e.g., revised acceptance criteria or additional validation steps) are incorporated.
4. Assurance input to decision-making: Providing independent quality considerations to the change control board or decision-making authority.
5. Post-approval monitoring: Ensuring approved changes are implemented with necessary quality controls in place. 

By integrating quality oversight at each stage of change control, the Project Assurance Manager helps prevent issues that could compromise project outcomes.

Background

The Department of Mega Projects (DMP) embarks on a significant overhaul of its Case Management Systems (CMS) under Project New Dawn. The goal is to modernise the department’s ability to manage and process customer cases. The project involves IT and non-IT components, including internal development, process enhancements, and the integration of external vendor solutions.

The project is complex, requiring seamless coordination among business areas within the department, external government departments, and third-party vendors. The department also recognises the need for robust oversight to ensure the system meets the expected standards of quality.

Challenges in Previous Projects

In prior initiatives, DMP encountered several challenges in large-scale IT project delivery:

• The difficulty of managing internal IT delivery and external vendor engagement.
• Unclear roles and responsibilities, leading to confusion between internal teams and external vendors. 
• Misalignment between the vendor’s product and the department’s needs.

These challenges highlighted the need for dedicated oversight and structured quality assurance, leading to the appointment of Pam Sterling as Project Assurance Manager.

Project Assurance Approach

Pam Sterling is appointed as the Project Assurance Manager, tasked with ensuring quality at every stage of the project, from initiation to closure. She integrates assurance processes across internal and vendor-led components, facilitating effective communication and governance. Her key activities include:

1. Establishing quality foundations for project delivery

• Defining clear quality standards: Pam leads the creation of quality expectations for the internal IT components and vendor-delivered applications. She ensures that these expectations are documented, communicated, and embedded into the project plan.
• Integrated delivery model: She develops a tailored project delivery model that aligns both internal and external components, ensuring smooth integration and clear role definitions for all teams involved, both internal and external.
• Vendor engagement: Pam is involved in the early stages of vendor selection, ensuring the Request for Proposal and associated documents are thorough, aligned with enterprise architecture, and clearly articulate the quality requirements for vendor components.
• Risk assessment and planning: She conducts a comprehensive risk assessment, identifying potential quality issues with both the internal IT components and external vendor deliverables. This early intervention ensures that risks are addressed proactively, with mitigations put in place to avoid downstream issues.

2. Refining quality assurance strategies

• Defining roles and responsibilities: She ensures that all teams, both internal and external, have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This helps avoid confusion and ensures accountability at all stages of delivery. 
• Resource planning: Pam works with the project manager to ensure that resources—both internal staff and external vendor teams—are appropriately skilled and allocated, with clear expectations for their contributions to quality. 

3. Quality oversight during project delivery

• Oversight of internal and vendor deliverables: Pam ensures that quality controls are integrated into both the internal and external delivery components. She monitors progress, ensuring that internal IT development, non-IT deliverables (such as process changes), and vendor-led components align with quality expectations. 
• Quality checks across teams: Pam facilitates regular quality checks to ensure consistency across all project components. This includes reviewing internal development outputs and third-party vendor deliverables for alignment with agreed-upon specifications.
• Quality issue resolution and escalation: As quality concerns arise, Pam escalates these to the right stakeholders, ensuring issues are addressed in a timely manner. For internal IT teams, this includes coordination with the project manager and IT leads; for vendor components, this involves direct engagement with the vendor management team and addressing any discrepancies in delivery. 

4. Independent project quality oversight and escalation

• Health checks: Pam conducts regular independent health checks at key project milestones. These checks evaluate whether both the internal and external components meet the project’s quality criteria.
• Escalating risks: Pam monitors emerging risks, ensuring that quality issues—whether they stem from internal teams or the vendor—are identified early and escalated to the project board or senior leadership for resolution. 

5. Ensuring successful delivery and post-project reviews

• Product quality checks: At project closure, Pam ensures that the final product, both internal and vendor-led deliverables, meets the agreed-upon quality standards.
• Post-project reviews: Pam leads the post-project assurance review, documenting lessons learned and identifying areas for improvement in project assurance practices. She captures insights from both internal teams and external vendors to refine processes for future projects.
• Documenting lessons learned: Pam ensures that the lessons learned during Project New Dawn are documented and shared across the department. These lessons focus on the integration of internal and vendor components, highlighting the importance of clear quality expectations, effective governance, and proactive risk management. 

Outcomes

Project New Dawn stands as a successful example of how a Project Assurance Manager can guide complex projects—balancing both internal delivery and vendor involvement—while ensuring that quality remains a priority throughout the lifecycle.