Project asurance with the OGC Gateway Review

Posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 by Simon Buehring

Every project needs assurance. According to the PRINCE2 project management manual, assurance is:

“All the systematic actions necessary to provide confidence that the target (system, process, organization, programme, project, outcome, benefit, capability, product output, deliverable) is appropriate.” (Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 2009, glossary)

Essentially, this means the methods and techniques that project managers use to ensure that their project does what it is supposed to do, to time and budget constraints, and without violating any of its quality criteria. The PRINCE2 project management guidance differentiates between Project Assurance and quality assurance.

Project Assurance is: “The Project Board’s responsibilities to assure itself that the project is being conducted correctly.” For example, the project Executive is responsible for business assurance, and the Senior Responsible Owner (SO) for the overall business change that the project supports.
(Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 2009, glossary)

Quality assurance, meanwhile, is an independent check – that is, a quality review from outside of the project team – that the products will be fit for purpose or meet requirements.

The OGC Gateway Review process is closer to quality assurance than to Project Assurance, in that it is performed by an independent Review Team. Rather than focus on the products of the project, however, a Gateway Review examines the overall structure, progress and prospects of a project or programme in order to provide advice for the project’s SRO on the deployment of the project team, stakeholder involvement, procurement management, meeting cost and time targets and progressing to the next stage of the project.

According to the OGC guidelines, a project will typically undergo five Gateway Reviews during its lifecycle: three before the organisation commits investment to the project, and two reviewing the service implementation and the operational benefits of the project. Although all project reviews follow the project review guidelines developed by the OGC, each individual project review should take into account the individual programme context, and interdependencies between the project in question, and other projects in the programme.

OGC Gateway Reviews are not intended to replace the need for quality assurance or Project Assurance, as defined by the PRINCE2 project management guidelines. They do, however, subject projects to an external scrutiny that encourages the most effective and successful management of project, programme and organisation business strategy.