Audience
This course is for IT auditors, business auditors, programme governance managers, and anyone responsible for providing assurance over major change programmes and projects and seeking a practical and repeatable approach.
Prerequisites
None.
Duration
2 days.
This course is available on site only. Please call for details.
Course Objectives
Organisations continue to undertake ever complex change projects and programmes, typically enabled by new IT platforms and technologies, in order to meet key business goals such as competitive advantage, regulatory compliance and cost reduction.
High profile "project disasters" continue to hit the headlines - adding reputational damage to the financial and organisational impacts of failure. Projects are all too often initiated without a clear understanding of why these failures occur, and having a good project delivery track record is not an absolute guarantee of future success. In addition, the embracing of new technologies and ways of working such as cloud computing, outsourcing and off shoring only serves to increase the risk profile.
With such high stakes, senior management require assurance that critical projects have been set up, and are being managed, to successfully deliver the required benefits on time, to scope and within budget.
The objectives of this course are to enable participants to:
- Understand programme and project risks and critical success factors.
- Develop an assurance plan for the life of an individual project.
- Conduct and rate programme and project health-check reviews.
- Evaluate key project deliverables such as business cases and project plans.
- Integrate project reviews into the annual audit plan.
- Manage the reporting to key stakeholders.
This course includes "hands on" exercises, real life examples and case study material to illustrate the key points.
Course Content
An introduction to projects, programmes and dependencies.
Project failure - root causes and impacts.
Programme and project risks and critical success factors.
The "fit for purpose" PMO.
The role of programme assurance and how to add value.
The assurance building blocks:
• A focused assurance work programme mapped to risk, the project life cycle and key milestones.
• Programme and project health check and readiness reviews.
• The recognition and escalation of early warning signs of project failure.
• Practical recommendations on programme governance and good practice project management controls.
• Timely, pertinent and succinct feedback to management.
Technical risks and IT project audit "hotspots" including, for example, data migration, testing, project estimating, managing third party delivery.
Ensuring robust IT and operational controls are built into the delivered systems and business processes.
Formalising the learning from projects and audits within the organisation.
Note: Course content can be tailored to focus on specific client risk areas and requirements.