NZ Treasury Gateway Review Lessons Learned Report 2017 Extract

The top eight themes have remained fairly consistent over the 200 New Zealand Gateway reviews to date, but the rankings are changing over time. Analysis of the trends in theme ranking identifies some key issues: `

1. Governance is a significant and growing concern, in part because the increasing trend towards large complex multi-agency and all-of-government projects requires a lift in capability. There are significant concerns that expectations are exceeding capability in this area.  `

1. RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies) management is a consistently weak area in the majority of projects reviewed.      

1. Although the number of recommendations around Business Cases has dropped since the introduction of Better Business Cases (BBC), it remains a key theme and there is still significant uncertainty about use of the BBC process, in particular:

1. how the process is applied to programmes

   1. the breadth and depth of detail that needs to be included in the documents

   2. how the process can be usefully scaled to ensure the documentation is a good match for the scale of the initiative..

The findings from Gateway reviews are in alignment with issues identified by other corporate centre processes including the Investor Confidence Rating.

1. Gateway Lessons Learned analysis, with information derived from other central agency processes contributes to the Treasury’s understanding of the issues, underlying problems and trends in government projects and has helped to identify key areas of focus for the Corporate Centre, for example: `

2. The Procurement Functional Leadership (PFL) programme is working to improve government’s procurement capability and performance and deliver better value through its procurement activity. It has developed systemwide initiatives to develop government’s commercial skills and practice, improve supplier engagement and development, and deliver benefits through collaborative procurement. `

3. The Corporate Centre, led by SSC, is considering what could be done for further develop commercial capability across government. `

4. The Treasury’s Investment Management and Asset Performance group (IMAP) is working to further develop Better Business Cases to increase support to agencies, in particular by the extension of Business Case Clinics beyond ‘capital intensive’ agencies and introduction of a tailored version suited to projects following an agile development methodology. `

5. Treasury’s introduction of the Investor Confidence Rating will enable Corporate Centre to target monitoring and interventions to focus on agencies and projects which require more assistance.

http://www.treasury.govt.nz/statesector/investmentmanagement/review/gateway/lessons/gateway-lessons-learned-report-jul17.pdf