Major programmes need more than internal confidence to succeed. They need investment, public trust, and a market ready with the right skills to deliver them. Alex Grant explains how independent integrated assurance, with the right expertise applied, unlocks all three. He sets out where the gaps and duplications most commonly sit, and where integrated assurance can help to identify and manage risks, helping to unlock the investment, confidence and capability that major programmes depend on.
Programmes need to unlock investment. They need to build confidence among stakeholders and clearly communicate to the market that the development and training for skills needed to deliver them is worth it. Independent assurance is one of the few mechanisms capable of doing this.
The challenge sits alongside an increasingly dense assurance landscape. Internal audit, second-line risk, independent gateway reviews and funder due diligence often operate on the same programme simultaneously, each on its own terms. For senior stakeholders, this rarely means a shortage of assurance activity. Programme Directors and Senior Responsible Owners often describe feeling over-assured yet under-informed, receiving reports that confirm what they already suspected while the risks that matter most surface too late.
Assurance duplication and omission
Programmes can be over-assured in volume while under-assured in substance, with several parties reviewing the same surface level indicators without testing the assumptions underneath. Governance grows burdensome as reporting cycles multiply without a matching increase in insight, and findings often restate known risks rather than surfacing what has been missed or quietly deprioritised.
Major programmes are temporary structures stretched across client organisations, delivery partners and oversight bodies, none of which owns the whole picture, so accountability for assurance blurs at the seams between them. Individual reviews multiply without adding up to a coherent view, and in many cases no one has actually decided who owns the assurance plan for the programme as a whole, so it defaults to whoever happens to produce it.
It also means looking at the interfaces generic assurance tends to miss, the seams between multiple advisers engaged through separate task orders, each accountable only for their own component, and the gate reviews where long-standing assumptions and quietly delayed decisions go unchallenged simply because they have become invisible to those closest to the programme.
The benefits of integration
Integrated programme assurance focuses on the places where value is most commonly lost, rather than duplicating what is already being reviewed. That starts with ownership: a credible integrated assurance plan needs a single, accountable owner, supported by an independent assurance provider playing the role a Chief Audit Executive would play in a listed organisation.
Applying the right technical capability to the review matters; expert led assurance delivered by specialists who understand the delivery model provides the greatest value, rather than generalist activity applied uniformly regardless of where the real exposure sits. Done well, this is what gives investors, the public and the supply chain confidence that a programme is mature.
Unlocking more value from assurance
“Demonstrable strategic alignment is a really clear indicator to the market to gear up and get involved because this programme is headed in the right direction.”
Alex Grant, Director of Programme Risk and Assurance, Grant Thornton, speaking on the MPA podcast Unlocking more value from assurance
Assurance should build confidence, not add cost
The volume of assurance activity on major programmes is rarely the issue; a coordinated, accountable view across that activity usually is. Programmes that get this right find assurance builds the confidence that senior stakeholders, investors, the public and the wider supply chain all need in order to commit, and signals to the market that the skills and capability required to deliver are worth investing in.
Getting there does not require dismantling existing assurance arrangements, but leadership needs to be more deliberate about where assurance is targeted, who owns the resulting picture, and whether the right technical capability sits behind it, ideally well ahead of a critical decision rather than after something has gone wrong.
Unlocking more value from assurance
“The collaboration gap is more of a symptom of the accountability gap that we see in major programmes. Assurance's true value is in unlocking that.”
Alex Grant, Director of Programme Risk and Assurance, Grant Thornton, speaking on the MPA podcast Unlocking more value from assurance
Questions worth asking now
A small number of questions can quickly reveal where integration barriers exist.
Who currently owns the assurance plan, and was that ownership a deliberate decision or simply whoever happened to produce it?
Have recent assurance reports told leadership something genuinely new, or largely confirmed what was already known? Repeated confirmation without fresh insight suggests assurance is checking the wrong things.
Where does the programme cross organisational boundaries, between client and delivery partner, between multiple advisers, and between programme and sponsor? And has assurance been designed around those specific seams rather than within each party separately?
Look honestly at technical capability too: for example where cost, commercial or contractual risk is high, the assurance in place needs the specialist depth to test it properly rather than relying on broader process assurance by default.
These questions show clearly whether a programme's assurance is integrated, or simply accumulating.
To discuss where integrated assurance could add value to your programme or organisation, get in touch with Alex Grant, Director of Programme Risk and Assurance at Grant Thornton.
