At Covelent, Project Assurance provides clients with deep, actionable insights into their ongoing projects, enabling them to take real-time, impartial and independent atmospherics of where you are currently and how close the delivery team are to your objectives, allowing you to take stock and make better-informed decisions.
The Importance of Project Assurance
Project Assurance stands as the foundation of any successful project. A failed project can have ramifications far beyond the scope of work; and projects that fail to deliver on critical objectives can have long-term effects on reputation, morale and finances. It's good practice to take stock, assess the situation and take atmospherics throughout a project lifecycle across all facets: strategy, operations, technology, stakeholder management, and beyond. It is also well understood that management updates can be presented in a favourable light., impacted by commercial factors and tactics designed to tell a very particular story of delivery and the deliverer.
What Project Assurance Can Help You Understand
- Is your project on track to deliver its stated objectives?
- How can you improve the likelihood of success for the project, or save a struggling project from failure?
- What can be done to expedite project delivery?
- How can your project team work together more effectively?
- What are the risks that will actually cause an project to fail and how can you mitigate them?
- How can you capture the full value of the IT project?
Further reading on our blog: What is Project Assurance?
Covelent's Project Assurance Approach
Effective Project Assurance can facilitate a smoother project execution process and uncover critical insights and operational improvements, leading to enhanced project performance and other significant benefits.
Conversely, insufficient Project Assurance can lead to suboptimal outcomes, eroding value, resulting in unforeseen costs, and unmet objectives. Project Assurance ensures that organisations, sponsors and SROs are equipped with impartial, detailed, relevant, and comprehensive information fast.
In our role, Covelent leverages significant strengths in the evaluation and vetting process, including advanced analytical tools and deep procedural knowledge. These tools are adept at identifying opportunities for adding value and pinpointing potential Project Risks from extensive data sets.
Overcoming Project Challenges
The primary challenge in project delivery is the imbalance of information—often, project teams are too close to the work to see the larger picture. Covelent addresses this gap using sophisticated methodologies and a deep understanding of Project Assurance best practice, tailored to the distinct needs of both public and private sector projects.
For all sectors, our strategy covers the full spectrum of Project Assurance activities, from initial Project Assessment to final Project Review. We focus on identifying risks, examining project operations, fostering stakeholder alignment, and facilitating effective project management practices, allowing you to concentrate on your core business.
Introducing the 'Six Eyes by Covelent' Solution
Six Eyes by Covelent is a turn-key solution that involves three sets of eyes: the client, the consultant, and us. We act as an independent third party to advise your leadership teams and your consultants, supporting the process, running evaluations, and performing litmus tests. This approach helps in refining budgets, resetting expectations, changing the course of a project, or more seriously, halting projects where budgets are being inefficiently utilised.
A typical engagement runs across 1-3 weeks, depending on project size. From this you get a much clearer sense of whether you’ll meet your objectives by the project's end. Our Project Assurance assessment offers atmospherics, detailing your current status, real risks, and likely points of failure. When you start to deviate from your objectives, we provide guidance on how to course-correct and meet those objectives. If you’ve been missing targets, we help you recalibrate and refocus attention.
Structuring Project Assurance with Covelent
Our approach to Project Assurance is iterative, addressing critical financial, operational, and technological questions. Drawing from our expertise and reputation as market observers, we offer in-depth analysis across various essential business areas:
- Project Risks and mitigation strategies
- Competitive advantages and technological fit
- Stakeholder engagement and alignment
- Operational optimisation potentials
- Project plan achievability and value creation possibilities
We explore all relevant sectors from marketing and sales to operations, HR, and IT to gauge the potential for value creation. Upon completing our Project Assurance engagement, we encapsulate our insights in a detailed Project Assessment report, often paired with a comprehensive Project Review to aid in decision-making. This comprehensive assessment enables you to make well-considered and impartial decisions, providing a solid foundation for your project's success.
Benefits of Project Assurance
Project Assurance ensures that projects are on track to deliver their stated objectives. It improves the likelihood of success, expedites project delivery, and ensures that project teams work together more effectively. It identifies risks that could cause project failure and provides strategies to mitigate them. Furthermore, it helps capture the full value of IT investments.
Our Project Assurance process includes:
- Scheduling interviews and launching web surveys
- Conducting structured interviews and document reviews
- Analysing survey results to create a “heat map” of project success factors
- Facilitating workshops to review findings and brainstorm remedies
Why organisations choose Covelent for Project Assurance?
Covelent offers the fastest and most comprehensive Project Assurance tool available. Our Project Assurance capability is the outcome of years of research and real-world experience. It delivers impact in days, focuses on what matters, connects business, operations and technology, and attains objectivity through fact-based assessments.
