Finance:Project delivery assurance

The business term project delivery assurance (PDAS) describes a methodology employed in construction or development projects to monitor the project process to provide a clear indication of the status of that project at any given time. The purpose of a PDAS is to provide a level of assurance, to the various stakeholders in that project, that a given status or specified capability exists (or will exist, at a given point in the future), for the project or process being monitored by the system.

The output from PDAS systems is often provided in the form of a digital dashboard, sometimes referred to as a performance dashboard or performance management dashboard.

The issue with digital dashboards such as those described above, is the loss of focus when the indicated status is reduced to a percentage or S-curve. For example, if an S-curve shows 80% completion, does that infer everything is at 80% or might it indicate that four out of five are complete whilst the other one is not started. This might be OK if you are reporting by VOWD, but if it will take 2 months to do the outstanding work and you are two weeks from start-up, then Houston you have a problem (that the digital dashboard did not highlight).

What this indicates is that performance and assurance are very different things.

Operations readiness and assurance

Commonly referred to using the acronym OR&A, the concept is synonymous with PDAS in as much as both concepts have the same functionality. They both work within the same field, but whereas OR&A is geared to the operations/asset owners viewpoint, a PDAS focusses on the viewpoint of the project management to provide that same assurance for every aspect of the entire project.

Further reading

• Eckerson, Wayne W. (2006). Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. John Wiley & Sons . ISBN:978-0-471-77863-9
• Trevor L. Young, Successful Project Management (2000, 2006) 2nd edition, Kogan Page Ltd. ISBN:978-0-7494-4561-4