Assurance plan example to speed up project delivery

Having a simple assurance plan helps you set expectations with your delivery, governance and independent review teams. It makes clear to everyone involved how you’ll ensure your project succeeds, and what that means for them.

Which is handy, because the less time you have to spend getting people up to speed, the more time you can spend delivering the benefits the project was set up to produce.

This is especially important for Agile projects, because many people don’t know what makes them tick.

The plan will clarify things like:

• the outcomes and scope of your project
• assurance roles and responsibilities
• assurance activities, meetings and deliverables
• risks for your project.

Earlier in the year we shared an example Agile assurance plan in our guide to Assurance for government projects. To make it easier to use, we’ve now created a downloadable Word version.

Because the fundamentals of assurance are the same in the private and not-for-profit sectors, the plan could come in handy even if you don’t work in government.

“I left the event buzzing”

We really enjoyed hearing back from the people who had attended our recent Test-drive collaborative hiring event.

Having the event in person, after COVID kept the past few online, made for a buzzy experience. And it gave us an excuse to lay on the pizza.

Here’s some stuff we heard back:

“Loved meeting the team, seeing the office and getting an idea of how the work is done.”

“The collaborative exercises were fun and definitely made you forget you were in an interview.”

“I really liked the honesty and authenticity of Boost and the team.”

“I have never been to anything like this before and felt empowered to be myself and be comfortable.”

“It was such a great experience. I feel lucky to have attended.”

“It was too short!”

Next Test-drive is set for 18 August

The idea of our Test-drives is to give people a chance to see if they’d find working at Boost fun and fulfilling. If you’ve been wondering if there are better jobs out there, don’t worry, you haven’t missed out. Our next Test-drive is pencilled in for 18 August.

Working for and with Māori

Boost designers Emma and Maryam are also buzzing, thanks to Johnson McKay’s te ao Māori workshop.

The aim of the workshop was to give designers confidence to engage with Māori communities and represent Māori aspirations.

Em and Maryam spend their days helping our government clients create positive impacts for the people of Aotearoa. That means they’re often working with and for Māori. Both found that the workshop gave them an excellent foundation for doing that. Along with practical guidance on things like pepeha, it gave them a framework to guide future work.

Johnson’s next Introduction to te ao Māori workshop is in Christchurch on 29 September.

Bringing more te reo into your mahi

Because using the language helps us understand the culture, we’ve also been working to bring more te reo Māori into our mahi. Here’s a kete of resources, tools and tips we’ve put together to help with this.

The latest resources for product leaders

Product Digest is a huge set of resources for product owners, product managers and the teams that work with them.

Product Digest is put together by the team behind airfocus product management software. You can sign up for the bi-weekly Product Digest newsletter, or simply browse through past issues.