Digital transformation concept and system engineering

Project Governance Assessment

How healthy are your transformation initiatives? We can help provide recommendations, methods, processes and tools to address gaps within your transformation execution and support the achievement of your business goals.

Is it time for a health check?

Embarking on digital transformation efforts can feel overwhelming, especially when nearly 84% of digital transformation initiatives fail. Organizations often get bogged down when implementing technology, and people and process challenges can disrupt digital-first transformations. Some questions to consider:

  • Have you implemented quality standards for project deliverables and processes?
  • How does your organization determine completeness and accuracy of third-party data?
  • How consistent is your organization in delivering projects that meet your quality standards?
  • Does your project management methodology help evaluate and effectively mitigate project and organizational risk?
  • Do you have a solid foundation in place for your transformation program?
  • Could you use a second opinion or coach to help design the operating model and governance for the program?
  • Could you use an experienced advocate to assist in gate reviews and ensure business readiness throughout the transformation process?

Baker Tilly Digital’s project governance assessment services can help mitigate the inherent risks that come along with large, complex, business transformation initiatives that can threaten the successful completion of projects and the obtainment of business goals. Our services conduct an unbiased health check across hundreds of transformation best practices to enable visibility and transparency to your program challenges.

Enable successful execution

Our team combines significant technology implementation experience with a strong business focused program and project management approach to deliver insights on risks and include actionable mitigation steps. Our methodology has been refined over the years based upon our practical expertise delivering complex IT initiatives employing waterfall, agile, hybrid and product-owner frameworks to provide the right level of actionable analyses uncovering issues and risks while minimizing project team disruption.

Our services provide key benefits to your organization:

Independent compilation of best practices being implemented in the organization or project

Recommendations on how to address the nonconformities and gaps in project governance and delivery

Early discovery of high-risk areas, leading to reduced costs to address project deficiencies

Enables the mitigation of risk to prepare for contingencies

Improves product or service quality prior to a go-live or other major milestones

Helps to ensure solutions deliver designed benefits on schedule and within the budget

Our assessment approach

Our project quality audit approach focuses on stakeholder interviews, category evaluation and assessment, and development of key findings related to 12 key project delivery health categories to provide actionable recommendations.

Those categories include:

  • Business case (cost management and value measurement)
  • Project organization
  • Scope articulation/management
  • Change management
  • Approach/plan management
  • Resource alignment/management (including procurement and vendor management)
  • Communications
  • Risk planning/mitigation
  • Issue management/resolution
  • Testing and quality assurance
  • Readiness/release management
  • Technology and tools

Project governance assessment breakdown

Our assessment approach includes the following steps:

  • Develop initial understanding: Understand program/project scope, objectives, desired end-state results and suspected areas of improvement
  • Select projects for assessment: Identify candidate projects for assessment
  • Conduct stakeholder interviews: Interview stakeholders across project team roles and levels to gain comprehensive view of project delivery
  • Analyze interviews and report findings: Final output includes structured assessment of key themes, assessment ratings and suggested actions
  • Initiate
  • Plan
  • Execute
  • Control
  • Close

  • Identify objectives
  • Develop project charter
  • Begin stakeholder assessment

  • Design project management plan by identifying tasks/activities, resource needs, duration(s) and dependencies
  • Establish financial management plan, including effort / cost associated to the project management plan
  • Plan quality management life cycle (QMLC)
  • Define resource management plan
  • Define communications strategy, approach and plan
  • Define risk management process, approach and plan
  • Identify quantitative and qualitative risk assessment
  • Establish stakeholder management plan

  • Execute souring/procurement strategy
  • Execute talent and resource management plan
  • Execute QMLC
  • Execute project/service activities
  • Execute communication plan
  • Source needed talent/resources (as needed)
  • Initiate stakeholder management

  • Govern, monitor and control project execution
  • Manage change control
  • Manage workstream execution, including workstream integration and dependency management
  • Govern, monitor and manage scope, timeline/schedule, project financials and QMLC
  • Govern, monitor and manage financials
  • Monitor communication plan and stakeholder engagement
  • Monitor/document risks, issues and decisions
  • Govern, monitor and control sourcing and procurement

  • Close project/service
  • Close procurements
  • Document lessons learned

A sample of key health checkpoints

Baker Tilly Digital works with your team to quickly and effectively identify ways to maximize return on your project investments. We can customize our approach based on your organization’s unique needs.

We work with your leadership team to customize a project sampling selection methodology that considers a relative sampling based upon size of projects, the type of project, organizational risk in relation to the intended project outcomes, project complexity, project budget, project or development methodology and project team delivery. The selection methodology can be leveraged to help you establish an inventory of projects from your portfolio to audit a specific percentage of projects that span across the various quality control checkpoints at various project stage gates as illustrated in the example below.

Project governance assessment process

Baker Tilly Digital is here to help

Our digital strategy expertise can help you understand how a cultivated and tactical digital plan enables your goals and better prepares you for digital transformation. Our digital strategy team is here to guide your team with a structured approach to enable organizational change, streamline operations and drive greater return from achieving your transformation goals.