Investment Assurance Ahead of Final Funding Approval

The brief

SOMA Project Controls was commissioned to provide independent schedule and cost assurance ahead of a major project’s final investment decision.

At this critical stage, the client required confidence that the programme and estimate being presented to decision-makers were sufficiently robust to support funding approval.

Investment assurance before funding approval is one of the highest-stakes moments in any capital programme. The numbers presented at sanction become the reference point against which all future performance is judged, the contract envelope in which the delivery team operates, and the basis on which the client’s board takes an effectively irreversible commitment. An assurance exercise that is either too light (confirming what the project team already believes) or too heavy (producing a 200-page critique with no decision orientation) fails the client equally. The brief was to deliver something in between — rigorous, independent, and actionable within the timeline of the approval decision.

What we did

SOMA undertook a structured review of the project schedule and cost basis to ensure assumptions were coherent, risks appropriately represented, and uncertainty clearly understood. This work informed the development of a quantitative schedule and cost risk analysis, aligned to the project’s delivery strategy and risk profile.

The assurance work was scoped in four layers, each answering a specific governance question:

• Schedule integrity review — DCMA 14-point health indicators, logic density, critical path transparency, lag/lead discipline, and resource loading. The question answered: is this a real network or a bar chart dressed up as one?
• Cost basis review — estimate class, contingency basis, inflation treatment, escalation assumptions, and exclusions/clarifications register. The question answered: does the cost estimate reflect the scope as defined, or is it a target that the project team is hoping to hit?
• Risk profile review — register maturity, risk-to-schedule and risk-to-cost mapping, ownership discipline, and the relationship between identified risks and the contingency provision. The question answered: does the risk register support or contradict the confidence levels being claimed?
• Quantitative synthesis — integrated QSRA and QCRA producing P50 and P80 confidence levels, sensitivity analysis on the principal risk drivers, and an explicit reconciliation against the headline figures being presented to the investment committee.

The analysis output

The analysis provided decision-makers with clear visibility of:

• Schedule and cost confidence levels
• Key risk drivers and sensitivities
• The relationship between schedule uncertainty and cost exposure
• Areas where the baseline was robust — not just where it was fragile, because a balanced assurance view builds credibility with the delivery team that has to live with the result
• Specific recommendations, ranked by the size of their impact on the P80 position, so that the investment committee could focus its scrutiny where it mattered

How the work informed the decision

A good assurance exercise gives decision-makers more than a confidence number — it gives them the ability to ask the right questions. The investment committee was able to challenge the project team on specific assumptions, request clarifications on specific risk allocations, and ultimately approve the project on a basis it genuinely understood rather than on a cover-sheet summary. That is the difference between an assurance review that adds governance value and one that only adds governance theatre.

We worked to the rhythm of the investment decision, not to the rhythm of a typical consulting engagement. Findings were shared in working sessions as they emerged, not held back for a final report. This meant the project team had the opportunity to respond to observations before the committee saw them — closing out weaker points, strengthening the justification on stronger points, and arriving at the decision meeting with a baseline that had already been pressure-tested.