Insights

Your Integrator’s Assurance, or Independent? How to Decide

When a systems integrator delivers your programme, it will usually offer its own quality assurance as part of the package. It sounds efficient, and it covers a real need, but it answers a different question from independent assurance, and confusing the two leaves a gap exactly where a sponsor most needs coverage. Here is the distinction and how to decide.

By Christopher Fagan

What integrator assurance does

An integrator’s own assurance checks that its work meets its standards: that the build is sound, the methodology is followed, the deliverables are complete. This is genuine and worth having. It is quality control of the integrator’s own delivery, by the integrator.

What it cannot do

What it cannot do is give you an unconflicted view of whether the programme as a whole will deliver what you need, because the party providing the assurance is the party being assessed. No matter how professional, an integrator assuring its own programme will not tell you that its plan is unrealistic, that its estimate was optimistic, or that the commercial arrangement is shaping the delivery. Those are precisely the things a sponsor needs to know, and precisely the things self assurance cannot surface.

What independent assurance adds

Independent assurance reports to you, not to the delivery organisation. It can question the integrator’s plan, challenge its optimism, and give you a view uncoloured by the commercial relationship. It covers the space the integrator’s own assurance structurally cannot: the honesty of the whole picture. See independent programme assurance.

How to decide

For small, low risk work, the integrator’s own assurance may be proportionate on its own.
For any programme large or consequential enough to matter to the board, you want both: the integrator’s quality control of its own delivery, and an independent view reporting to you.
Where the commercial stakes are high, a fixed price at risk, a strategic supplier relationship, independence matters most, because that is where the pressure to report optimistically is greatest.

The false economy to avoid

Relying solely on the integrator’s assurance to save cost is a false economy on a major programme. It leaves you without an unconflicted view at exactly the moments, go live decisions, funding gates, when an unconflicted view is worth most. The two forms of assurance are not alternatives. They cover different things, and on a serious programme you need both.

Talk to us

We provide independent assurance that sits alongside your integrator’s own. Get in touch.