ANIMAL JOBS WI

The board’s project governance responsibilities can be summarised as follows: • To approve product initiation, manage the project portfolio and pull the plug on any underperforming projects.

• To make one or more non-executive board members specifically responsible for overseeing project governance. They must have independent and informed oversight of progress on all business IT projects – including attending program (or large project) board meetings.

• To ensure clear accountability at all levels, with detailed, rigorously tested project plans based on a critical path analysis with clearly identified critical success factors, regular milestones and ‘go/no go’ checkpoints. • To ensure that every project proposal contains a full business case with a fully costed estimate that can stand up to independent audit, with clearly stated assumptions that can withstand rigorous analysis.

1. • To manage all IT related projects as part of a portfolio. • To adopt and deploy a recognised project management methodology.
2. • To adopt a clearly defined risk management plan at programme and project level that reflects corporate level risk treatment requirements. • To institute a monitoring framework to inform the board of progress and provide an early alert of divergence or slippage in any of the critical success factors. • To commit funding only on a phased basis.
3. • To ensure that internal audit is capable and accountable directly to the board for providing regular, timely and unambiguous reports on project progress, slippage, budget, requirements specification and quality requirements. Where there is project divergence the board should not release further funds until the cause of the divergence has been fully dealt with.

In selecting a project management methodology the organisation needs to choose an approach that is appropriate to its project objectives and development environment. By far the most popular methodology is Prince2, the successor to PRINCE ('Projects in Controlled Environments'), which was developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce. While PRINCE was originally developed for IT projects, Prince2 project management has incorporated substantial feedback and is now a generic, best-practice approach for all types of projects. Since its introduction in 1989, Prince2 project management has become widely used in both the public and private sectors and is now a de facto global standard.

Prince2 project management uses a structured methodology, which means managing a project in a logical and organized way, following clearly defined steps and well-understood roles and responsibilities. It perfectly matches the requirements of a project governance regime by delivering the following attributes to any project:

• A controlled and organised start, middle and end.

• Regular reviews of progress against plan and against the business case • Flexible decision points.

• Automatic management control of any deviations from the plan.

• The involvement of management and stakeholders at the right time and in the right place during the project.