Chapter 20
Ten Things for Successful Project Assurance
In This Chapter
Making sure that you actually do assurance
Avoiding the list tickers and nit-pickers
Making assurance helpful and co-operative
Project Assurance is the audit function in a PRINCE2 project. Project Board members can do it themselves, or they can delegate the audit checks to other people, who then report back to the board members. You can read much more about Project Assurance in Chapter 12.
Project Assurance is a hugely neglected part of PRINCE2 (except where users of the method read PRINCE2 For Dummies and realise how important this audit function is). But Project Assurance really is a vital part, just as financial audit is a vital part of financial management. Here are ten tips for making Project Assurance work well.
Making Sure You Do It
Okay, telling you to ensure that you do Project Assurance may sound a bit basic, but actually I’m making a very important point. Project Assurance is probably the most neglected part of PRINCE2. Few organisations question the need for financial audit, but a great number don’t think they need to bother too much about ‘project audit’, even for large and expensive projects.
In many cases organisations neglect Project Assurance because they had unpleasant experiences of bad financial auditors (oh, all right then, lots of unpleasant experiences of lots of bad financial auditors) and they think that PRINCE2 auditing will be just as annoying. Financial audit can be very productive, ...
