Independent Programme Assurance for a £120m Public Sector Digital Transformation

A central government department was midway through a £120 million digital transformation that consolidated four legacy case management systems into a single cloud-native platform serving more than 8,000 caseworkers and millions of citizens. Internal assurance, an integrator's own quality function and a separate Service Owner each held a different view of programme health. Ministerial scrutiny was rising as a major release approached and the department needed a single, independent, evidenced view of whether the programme was deliverable in the planned window without compromising live citizen services. Previous gateway reviews had surfaced concerns around data migration, accessibility compliance and operational readiness, but none had produced a clear, prioritised path to amber-green. The department also needed assurance that the supplier's commercials remained aligned with HM Treasury Green Book expectations.

Intology provided independent programme assurance throughout the critical 12-month window leading up to the major release. We established an evidence-based assurance framework covering delivery confidence, technical architecture, data migration readiness, operational readiness, supplier commercials and benefits realisation. Rather than running parallel reviews, we worked alongside the existing Service Owner and PMO to converge on a single, shared health view, with monthly evidenced reporting to the Senior Responsible Owner. We ran focused deep-dives on the data migration strategy, identifying that a phased reconciliation approach would materially reduce cutover risk versus the planned single migration. Architecture reviews surfaced two scalability concerns that were addressed before performance testing rather than during it. Accessibility was lifted from a defect-led activity to a design-led discipline embedded in the build cadence. Pre-release we ran a structured operational readiness review across service desk, business continuity and incident response, producing a clear go or no-go evidence pack for the SRO.