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Background and purpose

The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) engages across the digital project lifecycle to support, advise and coordinate the government’s digital and ICT-enabled investments via the six states of the Investment Oversight Framework (IOF). 

State 4 (Assurance) of the IOF aims to provide assurance to government that approved digital projects are on-track to deliver expected outcomes and benefits – including by ensuring projects plan for and implement fit-for-purpose assurance activities to support good decision-making throughout delivery. 

The DTA engaged the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership at The University of Sydney to contribute to a research series aimed at eliciting best practice guidance to maximise the rate of digital project success. 

As the first topic in this series, this paper and the guidance within supports independent assurers tasked with assurance activities that review and assign Delivery Confidence Assessment (DCA) ratings for digital projects.

The primary purpose is to help improve the consistency and understanding of DCA ratings for digital projects. 

Specifically, this publication is intended to:

• Address the unique challenges and issues faced by digital projects.
• Outline inputs and focus areas that assurance reviewers could use to determine DCA ratings.
• Provide general tolerance levels for each rating category.
• Uplift capability and understanding of DCA ratings for the people who use them, including Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) and project boards. 

The primary audience for this guidance consists of: 

• Departments and agencies (agencies) and Independent Assurance Providers (IAPs) engaged by agencies.
• Senior Responsible Officials (SROs) within agencies who are accountable for digital projects.
• Governance boards (also called steering committees) overseeing digital projects.
• Central agencies of the government (such as the DTA) who rely on DCAs to form advice to government.

Assurance Research Series: 01

What are Delivery Confidence Assessment (DCA) ratings and why are they important? 

Delivery Confidence Assessment (DCA) ratings result from independent assurance activities that agencies conduct to assess the confidence level of the project delivering successfully. 

Assurance activities are defined as independent and objective assessments and evaluations undertaken by people and entities separate to the delivery team and the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO). While not every assurance activity will produce a DCA rating, every DCA rating will have an associated assurance activity that informs the rating.

The Assurance Framework for Digital and ICT Investments requires that regular assurance activities are conducted to produce a DCA. These ratings are crucial to provide an indication of an investment’s overall trajectory to deliver on intended outcomes and benefits. 

The DTA draws heavily on assurance information to inform and focus its oversight and engagement across the portfolio of in-flight digital and ICT investments.

DCAs form a key input to the DTA’s advice and reporting to government. Information from DCAs helps shape government improvements to the ways in which digital projects are managed. They help to ensure that at-risk projects trigger escalation processes and help to direct remediation planning to at-risk projects so they can be brought back within accepted success criteria.

Consistency in how DCAs are defined is critical to the effectiveness of key decisions by project governance forums and to the DTA’s oversight and advice. 

Assurance activities that require the inclusion of a DCA rating in reports provided to the DTA must use the agreed ratings below. They should also instil confidence the DCA rating being awarded is unbiased, rigorous and evidence based.

Procurement and contracts

In particular, the review identified the following improvement opportunities:

• Further value can be obtained in existing policies by negotiating adoption expectations in the head agreement, rather than devolving this responsibility to the buyer’s contract (e.g. CAIP Plans).
• Consider how to mitigate unintended market consequences in the existing Contract Limits and Review Policy to address unintended market outcomes.
• Define data and digital sovereignty with consideration of localisation requirements, and assess the technology landscape to identify technology necessitating stronger cyber and security requirements.
• Distinguish more clearly whole of Australian Government digital contracts from Coordinated Procurements within the Commonwealth Procurement Rules (CPRs).
   

Procurement and contracts

2.1 Single seller arrangements (SSAs) are pre-negotiated, whole of Australian Government technology agreements with specified sellers, established to leverage the government's collective buying power and ensure consistency with legal terms and conditions. They are not a procurement pathway. 

2.2 The policy and legislative environment is constantly changing. Similar to other long term contractual arrangements (e.g. Digital Marketplace Panel 2), an SSA may become out of step with policy changes over the life of the contract. For example, the recent introduction of the Supplier Code of Conduct on 1 July 2024 required updates to be made to the SSAs. This necessitates the periodic review of the SSAs throughout their life to ensure ongoing alignment to the policy and legislative environment as it changes.

2.3 To manage this, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) routinely undertakes procurement policy compliance assessments for the SSAs. Further, the SSAs include clauses that allow updates to be made to the SSAs as policy and legislative environment changes. 

2.4 When undertaking any procurement activity, there are a range of policies any digital procurement needs to consider, as depicted in the chapter overview above. Some policies have specific values that trigger different requirements for digital procurements are triggered, which is depicted in the figure below.