DELIVERY ASSURANCE: What it is and why it matters

Within ALTEN Switzerland, the Technical Direction aims at developing and realising solutions for our clients. We provide them with services focused on results and guidance, that complement our consulting activity.

Within the Technical Direction, the Delivery Assurance department is primarily responsible for ensuring the best possible service delivery.

You might be wondering, why are we talking about Delivery Assurance and not Quality Assurance? The reason is that in most cases the actual quality of results is managed in our clients’ quality management systems, and to make a clear distinction between the two, we have decided to use the term Delivery Assurance.

The importance of Solution Projects

To further strengthen ALTEN's position as a premium partner, solution services are becoming increasingly important. With these SOLUTIONS, we offer the often decisive technical and managerial expertise and workload relief, that companies are looking for when they want to develop new business opportunities, or when confronted with urgent challenges.

Our pillars: keys for success

In order to be able to keep our promise of providing the best possible guidance and results, we rely on two pillars: firstly, good consultants, and secondly, a continuous feedback loop that connects the key stakeholders. This feedback loop ensures the identification at an early stage of any relevant technical or organisational problems, or changing expectations, and that appropriate actions are undertaken.

The building blocks of our process

To achieve this in practice, close cooperation between all the involved parties is required. Our Delivery Assurance Managers act therefore as the pro-active link between clients, consultants, Business Managers, and Technical Unit Managers. They gather and consolidate the relevant information and provide the appropriate feedback. A recurrent systematic process ensures the efficiency of the procedure. The most important building blocks within this process are:

• Mutual Cooperation Quality Assessments: client, but also consultants, systematically assess several aspects of the cooperation from their perspective;
• One-to-one exchanges with our consultants: it helps to capture the soft factors of the workplace;
• ALTEN internal steering meetings: the stakeholders discuss the solutions to support the projects, make decisions, and resolve issues that might happen.
• Dedicated Delivery Assurance Meetings with the clients’ project managers

The Delivery Assurance has already proven to be effective in increasing the client satisfaction and, equally important, the work satisfaction of our consultants. It has also turned out to be a truly Unique Selling Point that is well appreciated by existing and new clients.