Infrastructure Investment Assurance Framework

Established in 2011, Infrastructure New South Wales (INSW) is an independent statutory agency tasked with directing the state’s 20-year strategy for infrastructure development.

The agency provides expert advice to the state government on infrastructure need, accelerates priority projects that boost the economy, and manages procurement and delivery of key projects.

Monitoring major projects promoted by all state agencies – from planning through delivery to completion – is another core function. The INSW does this through its risk-based infrastructure investment assurance framework (IIAF).

Brief

An important requirement of the INSW project monitoring regime is regular evaluation of how the framework itself is performing. HKA was engaged to analyse the findings from its assurance reviews. The aim was to identify trends emerging across the state’s portfolio of capital projects, and to provide recommendations for addressing deficiencies and opportunities to improve how projects are assessed and monitored.

What we did

More than 100 projects with a total value in excess of US$68 billion (A$95 billion) were covered by our review. These projects, at various stages of their life cycle, were in a range of areas including transport, health, justice, education and urban renewal.

The assurance reviews had been conducted during a two-year period from May 2015 to May 2017. In total 173 gateway reviews – many for projects assessed at several stages in their development – were analysed.

Gateway reviews analyse and report on projects against 18 themes developed by INSW. Our team refined these themes – which range from the quality of the business case and governance to stakeholder engagement and sustainability – defining criteria by which to assess the outputs from assurance reviews.

To provide as comprehensive an assessment as practicable, our team analysed projects according to their type, scale, agency and project phase. The HKA consultants also identified headline and emerging trends, both positive and negative.

As well as tabling a series of recommendations for improving the assurance framework, our consultants developed a relational database to capture all their findings and the underlying data. The database design was aligned with the reporting processes of the IAAF.

Outcomes

Our analysis provided valuable insights for INSW into current deficiencies as well as good practice in the delivery of capital projects across New South Wales.

These recommendations contribute to the ongoing refinement of the IIAF and confidence that its robust investment assurance reviews will improve project performance and ensure that capital projects are effectively developed and delivered to meet the state government’s objectives.

The relational database has provided added value as it was adopted as the reporting tool for all future IAAF performance reporting.

HKA has been commissioned to review the next tranche of assurance reviews, for the period June 2017 to June 2018.