Role Overview
The Project Assurance Manager (PAM) plays a crucial role in strengthening quality management throughout the lifecycle of enterprise IT projects. By embedding quality practices into the project, the PAM ensures that frameworks, tools, and methodologies mandated by the PMO are effectively applied, addressing gaps in traditional assurance models.
Key responsibilities and strengths of the PAM role include:
- Bridging the gap between the PMO’s frameworks and their practical application, ensuring that quality is integrated into project delivery, not just a theoretical requirement.
- Filling gaps in traditional project assurance by providing continuous oversight and visibility, addressing issues proactively rather than relying on periodic health checks.
Removing conflicts of interest by focusing solely on quality, separate from time, cost, and scope management, ensuring that deliverables meet the highest standards. - Embedding quality discipline across all project phases, ensuring consistent and ongoing attention to quality rather than a one-time audit or post-project review.
The PAM’s independent, dedicated focus on quality strengthens governance and enhances project outcomes, ensuring enterprise IT projects are delivered with integrity, on time, and to the required standards.
Responsibilities and Accountabilities
The Project Assurance Manager holds key responsibilities essential for successfully delivering enterprise IT projects. These include:
- Defining project roles and skills: Responsible for recruiting project participants and assessing their suitability. This begins with creating frameworks to determine resource and skill requirements and clearly defining roles so all team members understand their responsibilities in achieving quality outputs.
- Establishing the project approach: Defines the delivery model, organisational structure, and team guiding principles. This includes outlining project outputs, setting documentation guidelines, and assigning deliverables to specific roles. Continuous quality assessments at each project stage ensure adherence to operational quality management.
- Providing support tools: Ensures applications, tools, and templates are available to meet the project's specific needs, aligning technology with the strategic and operational objectives of quality management.
- Monitoring compliance and best practices: Continuously oversees project execution to ensure adherence to established frameworks and industry best practices, supporting consistent and effective project delivery.
- Quality control of deliverables: Conducts ongoing quality assessments at each project stage, ensuring every output meets the required standards before product acceptance.
- Resource assessment: Evaluates team performance against the skills claimed during recruitment, focusing on deliverable quality and ensuring all team members effectively fulfil their roles.
- Independent quality reporting: Provides unbiased reports to the project board on quality-related aspects, focusing solely on quality without the constraints of managing time and cost.
Table 25 outlines the proposed transfer of responsibilities from the PMO and Project Manager to the Project Assurance Manager. This strategic realignment is designed to enhance project oversight by tailoring roles and responsibilities to meet each project's unique demands better.
| Responsibility | PMO | Project Manager | Project Assurance Manager |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery model | Enterprise standard delivery model | — | Custom project organisation structure |
| Project organisation structure | Project organisation structure prescribed by the delivery model | — | Project organisation structure based on the customised delivery model |
| Roles and responsibilities | Roles and responsibilities prescribed by the delivery model | — | Roles and responsibilities based on the customised delivery model |
| Processes | Enterprise standard methodologies, frameworks, and practices | — | Custom methodologies, frameworks, and practices |
| Technologies | Enterprise standard technologies | — | Custom configuration of standard technologies |
| Templates | Enterprise standard templates | — | Custom standard templates |
| Audit | Project audit | — | Project audit, limited to the specified responsibilities |
| Time, cost, and scope | — | Schedule and budget tracking, scope control | — |
| Quality | — | — | Quality measures and controls |
| Deliverables identification | — | — | Deliverables identification |
| Skills requirements | — | — | Skills requirements and role definitions based on identified deliverables |
| Deliverables tracking | — | Deliverables tracking | — |
| Resource management | — | Resource management | — |
| Skills assessment | — | Ongoing assessment of resource suitability | Assessment of delivered outputs (technical skills assessment only) |
| Status reporting | — | Project status reporting | Quality status reporting |
| Lessons learned | — | Project lessons learned | Lessons learned on project quality aspects |
Why This Shift Strengthens Project Assurance
Shifting from a PMO-led, checklist-based assurance model to an embedded Project Assurance Manager strengthens the quality and integrity of project delivery without weakening the PMO’s governance role. This approach ensures proactive quality oversight, reducing risks that often arise when quality assurance is fragmented or deprioritised in favour of time and cost pressures.
Addressing the Gaps in Traditional Assurance
- PMO’s role in assurance is too distant: The PMO typically provides frameworks, tools, and periodic health checks, but it lacks real-time visibility into daily project activities. Assurance activities are often retrospective, identifying issues only after they have impacted delivery. This limits the PMO’s ability to prevent quality failures before they escalate.
- Project Managers face an inherent conflict of interest: The Project Manager is accountable for time, cost, and scope, creating a natural conflict when also responsible for assessing quality. Under pressure to meet deadlines, quality can become a secondary priority, leading to risks being downplayed or overlooked. When execution and quality oversight sit with the same individual, objective assurance is compromised.
How This Shift Improves Project Delivery
- Proactive quality oversight, not just compliance checks: The PAM operates within the project, ensuring continuous quality management instead of reactive compliance checks. This prevents late-stage issues that require costly rework or compromise outcomes.
- Bridging the gap between PMO oversight and project execution: The PAM ensures that assurance frameworks and tools set by the PMO are supported within projects. Instead of relying on infrequent PMO audits, project quality is monitored in real time, allowing for course correction before issues escalate.
- Strengthening, not replacing, PMO governance: The shift does not reduce the PMO’s influence—it reinforces it by ensuring that governance standards are not just documented but actively upheld within projects. Instead of being an external entity raising red flags too late, the PMO benefits from real-time, independent quality insights from an embedded expert.
- Enhancing delivery without undermining the Project Manager: The PAM is not a replacement for the Project Manager but a complementary role focused solely on quality. With separate oversight of execution and quality, projects achieve a balance between delivery pressures and quality expectations.
This practical, high-impact change ensures that quality assurance is an active function within projects rather than a passive governance process. By embedding dedicated expertise in quality management, enterprise IT projects can achieve higher-quality outcomes, reduced rework, and improved chances of overall success.
