Becoming a Gateway Hub

Transcript

Alan Little, MOD Programmes and Project Management
At the Ministry of Defence there were a number of different processes in place for peer review, we had a process operating in the acquisition area for military equipment and defence logistics, we had a separate process operating in the IT enabled area, we had other processes operating in the business change world.  But what we found over time was that the issues were pretty much the same across the piece and we needed to sort of apply a consistent standard and Gateway offered such a standard.

Sir Ian Andrews, Second Permanent Under Secretary of State - Ministry of Defence
It seemed to us that the Gateway approach was a systematic approach across Government which had external credibility.

Alan
I think we became a Gateway hub because although we can rely on the OGC to deliver reviews of our mission critical projects, we have got an awful lot of projects at high and medium risk across the department which do need to enter the review process.

Sir Ian
It was not reasonable for us to expect the OGC to continue to provide us with that service and therefore what we wanted to do was to imbed the Gateway culture within the department.

Alan
We worked very closely with OGC.  We adopted their tools, lock, stock and barrel, implemented that, I think it took us about 6 months to set up our organisation and an operating framework.  After that 6 months, with OGC's agreement, we actually started delivering reviews.

We are allowed on, particularly on medium risk projects, to use people from within the department, because it is a massive department, but we make sure we select reviewers from really quite different areas of the department to review particular programmes and projects but you get a lot of benefit from reviewers coming from other Government departments, the wider public sector, consultants off the OGC pool, I think the SRO's really do appreciate really a totally new look at their programmes, it's not the department coming in to do an audit or as part of the standard programme assurance mechanism, it's someone who is coming in to help, they are producing something for the SRO and they work in a collaborative style with the SRO.

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