Anybody who has attended a programme management event in the last ten years has probably witnessed at least one debate on the definition of programme assurance. Usually it’s an ideological battle between various camps of theorists and methodologists, where words like ‘confidence’ and ‘likelihood of success’ are bandied about quite liberally. Personally, I find these debates quite wearing, partly due to their failure to understand the difference between accounting assurance and programme assurance, and partly because if programme assurance as a concept is that immature, surely the better question is “what should programme assurance be?”
What really doesn’t help is the absence of any consideration of specifically who the client is, and therefore what the client needs. Oxford8 is very clear-eyed about this. Programme assurance is not for the programme, or for the host organisation, although they are both beneficiaries of programme assurance done well. The client is the executive sponsor of the programme – the person who is answerable to the Board.
If a programme goes wrong, it is typically treated like a sudden change in the weather – unexpected, unforeseeable and not really anyone’s fault. The only exception to that treatment is the executive sponsor, as the brutal grilling of Paul Pester, the CEO of TSB by the Treasury Select Committee in 2018 illustrated so vividly.
So if the executive sponsor is the client, what do they actually need? In a nutshell, they need to be able to demonstrate that they are in control. That sounds simple, but has to be considered alongside two factors. The first is that is any executive has a demanding day-job, so they have limited time available – which is not compatible with being all over the detail. The second is that not every executive sponsor is a programme expert. Selection of the sponsor is typically driven by domain responsibility (e.g. the CFO for a finance transformation). Precious little consideration is given to prior experience of the demands of the role, and that’s often echoed by the sponsor’s own reflections of ‘having learned a lot’ by the time the programme is finally delivered.
If the objective of assurance is to enable control by the executive sponsor, what does that mean in practice? Fundamentally, it comes down to four forms of sight. The first is line-of-sight – a direct eyes-on understanding of what goes on in the engine-room of the programme. That involves native discussions and direct contact with the people, the materials and the outputs that the programme produces. It is time-intensive and requires expertise, so it falls into the remit of programme assurance. The second is insight – interpretation of what is seen in the engine-room into useful information, be that a diagnosis, a root cause analysis, or in many instances the simple identification of a point problem. That’s similarly time-intensive and also draws on comparative experience of other programmes, so again falls into the remit of programme assurance. Then there is foresight – anticipation of potential problems, based on symptoms, trajectories and pattern recognition, all of which needs to be supported with options to resolve . Again, it’s time-intensive and requiring expertise, so it falls into the remit of programme assurance.
Executed correctly, the line-of-sight, insight and foresight then enable the bit that lands squarely in the lap of the executive sponsor; the oversight. That’s where situational awareness, interpretation and anticipation are blended together to provide what every programme needs from its executive sponsor; leadership.