The Firewood Assurance Service Tool (FAST) allows you to design and implement your assurance framework and conduct assurance reviews consistently using industry best practice that is tailored to your needs

“9.9% of every dollar is wasted due to poor project performance-
that’s $99 million for every $1 billion invested”

Project Management Institute, 2018

FAST gives you insight into how your people, your teams and your organisation are performing 

Pre-built assurance frameworks

​

Providing you with access to best management practice that can be used as building blocks to create your own frameworks.

Measures for checking project performance

Allowing you to quickly review your projects using built-in measures that are aligned to the pre-built best practice frameworks. 

Customisable scoring

​

Using pre-built and bespoke scoring mechanisms to allow you to consistently rate project performance and identify trends across the portfolio.

Your own review templates

​

Using pre-built frameworks and your own assurance arrangements to create review criteria that are tailored to your specific need.

Maintaining records

Tracking which documents you have reviewed and who you have interviewed.

Continuous improvement

Capturing lessons that can be applied to other projects and other reviews, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Traceable findings

​

Linking review findings and recommendations to documents reviewed, interviews and observations made throughout the review.
 

Performance reviews

Diving into reviews to help you understand in which areas projects are under-performing.

Project performance trends
 

Tracking how a project performs over time by comparing the results of all of its reviews.

Agreed actions

​

Showing you the actions resulting from a review together with their owners and their status.

In-flight action tracking​

​

Capturing and presenting data from reviews in real-time, allowing you to take actions immediately and not having to wait for a report to be produced.

In-flight reporting​

​

Building assurance reports online transparently and in real-time, allowing you to immediately see how reviews are progressing.

Personal notes and actions​

​

Allowing your reviewers to keep records as reviews progress together with a real-time view of their personal actions.

Portfolio-level action tracking​

​

Letting you see the status of all of the follow-on actions so that your teams can focus their efforts on what matters the most.

Evidenced-based strengths and weaknesses

​

Describing how all your projects are performing cut in different ways, then allowing you to improve on areas where you need to, whilst continuing doing what you are already doing well. 

Portfolio performance reviews

​

Reviewing portfolio performance over time against multiple frameworks

Predictive analytics​

​

Showing how your projects are performing over time and what to specifically look out for in future reviews – harnessing your data to make intelligent business decisions.

What's in it for me? 

FAST for individuals​

​

• Confidence that your project or programme is following your organisation’s approach

• Highlighting performance issues that you or your team need to address

• Tracking actions put in place to help improve performance

• Demonstrating that your project or programme performance is improving over time

• Understanding how your project or programme is performing relative to those of your peers

• Having everything in one place in real time with no more papers to read meaning you can use your time more efficiently by focusing on what really matters

​​

FAST for teams​

What’s in it for individuals plus….
 

• Tailoring project and programme reviews using recognised best practice and your organisation’s assurance approaches

• Understanding how the projects and programmes in your portfolio are performing right now and how performance is improving over time

• Showing you where I need to prioritise interventions to give you “more bangs for the buck” when projects and programmes underperform

• Visible corrective actions in real time to show you that you're making progress towards addressing performance issues

• Highlighting systemic trends in project or programme management disciplines that need to be improved and helping you decide on what to do first

• Being able to check what you want, when you want to and where you want to

​

FAST for the enterprise​

What’s in it for teams plus….
 

• Giving you confidence that your organisation’s projects and programmes are on track to deliver their outputs, outcomes and benefits so that you can sleep at night

• Understanding which of your portfolios are performing better or worse than the others, finding out why and deciding what to do about it

• Having data at your fingertips when you need to call a project or programme manager or answer a question from your customers

• Understanding how your organisation performs relative to other organisations

• Integration with your business information systems, PPM tools, repository and calendars

• Helping you target how you develop your project and programme managers

• Access to additional support from Firewood’s recognised subject matter experts to help you improve your project, programme and portfolio management capability

​