I’m paraphrasing ever so slightly, but staying with the theme of Intent Based Leadership and L. David Marquet‘s Turn The Ship Around, we had an interesting discussion this month with an international cohort of Programme Sponsors around the role of Programme Assurance.
I also had the opportunity to take part in a Gateway Review of a Digital Transformation Programme which was, as ever, interesting and insightful with lots to see and learn about.
The resulting discussions reminded me that any form of inspection can be daunting and often feel intrusive, untrusting. Often the questions in an Assurance Review only travel one way, with more time spent explaining the current position, defensively, than exploring the insights and opportunities that the discussion could bring.
While the value of assurance is undeniable, the fact that the reviewer will learn something from every review they complete, just might mean that they could have seen a solution to one of your challenging problems in another programme.
This put me in mind again of Turn the Ship Around. Now you would have to read the book to see the real detail of this. It is only very lightly touched upon in the video. In transforming leadership on the USS Santa Fe, L. David Marquet encouraged his crew to Embrace the Inspector. Not literally, but to fully engage with the inspection process and to use their Inspectors as an opportunity to learn.
No doubt this was a refreshing experience for the Inspectors, who more often than not would have to prise the responses from their victims, and this would probably have led to a completely different exercise and outcome. I’m sure that being asked for their expert opinion from time to time would put them in a very different frame of mind.
Back to the discussion. We all accepted that, Programme Assurance, which was to some a new concept, is an invaluable tool for the Programme Sponsor, the Board and the Organisation. The interesting part was the debate around the value of the exercise when, all too often, the programme team already knows about the issues and blind spots. There are always plenty of other things to do and we concluded that a major part of the value lay in creating the impetus to give them a priority.
What we also concluded was that perhaps the further potential of an Assurance exercise is to use the independent review as a learning opportunity. Tapping into the experiences of the review team, the different approaches and solutions they may have seen on their travels, could provide a fresh perspective and consequently an opportunity to resolve these issues in an innovative way.
Encouraging the programme team to ask a few questions in the other direction could make the Assurance process less intimidating and even more valuable.
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