There’s a striking contrast in the world of project delivery.
On one end, you have organisations in London fighting for every efficiency, trying to deliver more with less and stretch the value of every pound. On the other, you have Dubai — where the 2040 Urban Master Plan is delivering new districts and infrastructure on timelines that are unimaginable anywhere else.
Two very different worlds, with very different priorities. Yet both place the same pressure on leaders: make good decisions, use resources wisely, avoid unnecessary waste, and move the organisation meaningfully — and measurably — closer to its goals.
The last thing any leader needs is a failing project.
In London, that usually means uncomfortable conversations with the C-Suite.
In Dubai, it can mean very public scrutiny.
Either way, careers can stall. And in the most serious cases, especially where public safety or financial integrity is involved, the consequences can extend far beyond the project itself.
The Role of Assurance
And this is where a dedicated capability focused on independent oversight, challenge, and early warning — in other words, project assurance — can make all the difference. It gives leaders a clear, unbiased view of whether the work is genuinely under control.
Unlike Audit — which usually explains why things went wrong after the fact — and unlike the PMO — which typically manages the delivery environment, cadence, and reporting — assurance looks directly at the reality of the work and the risks emerging around it.
It focuses on what’s happening right now, what’s likely to happen next, and whether you’re equipped to deal with it. Done well, it becomes the quiet partner that gives leaders clarity and confidence, helps project managers avoid hidden pitfalls and self-sabotaging behaviours, and strengthens the organisation around them.
The Cost Question
Of course, the natural question is: “Do we really need this? And is it worth the cost?”
It’s a fair challenge.
A dedicated assurance capability — whether that’s one senior specialist or a small, focused team — isn’t cheap. You’re paying for people with the experience and perspective to recognise danger early; people who’ve seen enough delivery environments to notice when something doesn’t quite add up, even when everything looks fine on paper.
But the alternative is almost always more expensive. A programme slips. A vendor relationship sours. A deployment falters. A reputation is damaged. The financial consequences are easy to count, but the career consequences often aren’t.
And the irony is that organisations will invest in insurance for buildings, vehicles, and equipment without question — yet hesitate to safeguard their most expensive, most strategic, and most publicly visible work: major change.
Assurance gets dismissed as a cost centre, when in reality it’s one of the simplest ways to avoid the mistakes that drain budgets, damage credibility, and slow momentum.
Why Even the Best Teams Need It
Whether you’re in a legacy London organisation tightening belts, or in Dubai shaping the skyline every morning, you face the same two universal risks:
Blind spots — you don’t see what’s coming because you’re too close to the work.
Silence — people see the danger but don’t feel safe to say it aloud.
Assurance exists to cut through both. It adds an outside, experienced perspective that prevents the quiet drift into optimism that eventually turns into crisis.
But perhaps more importantly, assurance creates the conditions for difficult truths to surface. In every organisation, there are moments when the stakes are high, the personalities are strong, and the pressure to “keep things positive” becomes overwhelming. In those moments, leaders can become unintentionally intimidating, and people lower down the chain simply stop raising concerns.
Assurance breaks that pattern. It gives people a safe route to escalate worries, share evidence, and highlight risks without fear. And it gives leaders the information they need — early, clear, and unfiltered — to make better decisions.
So What Mistakes Are We Making?
If blind spots and silence are the symptoms of project delivery failure, the obvious next question is: what’s causing them — and what are the mistakes we keep repeating?
It’s a question I’ve been exploring through the Assurance Insights Series — a set of free advisory sessions I’ve been running with project leaders around the world. What struck me is how similar the problems are, regardless of geography, sector, or scale. Whether the participant came from a heavily regulated portfolio or a fast-moving transformation, the root causes kept pointing back to the same three fundamentals:
Structure. Visibility. Control.
Every gap, every near-miss, every piece of bad news that arrived too late could be traced back to a weakness in one of those areas.
Leaders weren’t making catastrophic strategic mistakes. They were simply missing the basics:
Work wasn’t set up in a way that supported clear ownership and decision-making.
Information wasn’t flowing honestly or early enough to show what was really happening.
And when things shifted — as they always do — the organisation couldn’t adjust quickly or safely.
Different industries.
Different cultures.
Different ambitions.
But the same three weaknesses, repeating again and again.
And that’s where assurance becomes invaluable — it identifies these gaps long before they surface as issues, giving leaders the chance to fix the fundamentals while it still matters.
The Irony of Success
The irony, of course, is that this is exactly why many effective assurance functions are eventually cut. When assurance is working, the big problems never appear. There are no disasters, no crises, no last-minute rescues. And because the pain never materialises, the value becomes invisible.
So when spending cuts arrive, the assurance function can look like the easiest cost saving on the page — a team that “isn’t needed” because nothing seems to be going wrong.
But nothing was going wrong because they were there.
But don’t feel sorry for us. The experienced assurance professionals know this. We don’t resent it — it comes with the territory. With enough time in this field, you learn to expect it. There’s always another crisis to prevent, another blind spot to uncover, another quiet piece of trouble moving in the background. The work never disappears. It just moves.
A Final Thought
In most organisations where I’ve worked with fully funded assurance teams, they appear only after a disaster — usually prompted by a severe loss, a public humiliation, or a painful audit recommendation. But you don’t have to wait for that moment.
Build the safety net before you need it.
