Mr. John Kennedy:

Basically, we have developed an application whereby the business cases are submitted for consideration by the governance group and then go to the technical subgroup for evaluation based on whether or not they conform to the architecture, the strategy, that kind of thing. The technical subgroup will then either make a recommendation to the overall governance group or go back to the project sponsor if there are further clarifications. The output from the technical subgroup then goes to the governance group. This is all on an automated workflow application that has been developed in the past year.

The governance group then, at the governance group meeting, either approves or queries any projects. We get the project sponsor of any major project with significant spend to come in and present their business case directly to the governance group. Once the approval has been granted, the system takes that into a list of the active projects. Then, the project sponsor has to give a monthly report on that. At the governance group then, as well as evaluating the projects that are for approval, any previous projects that are still open and active are reviewed. The project sponsor has to give us what we call a red, amber and green status. Anything that is green is fine, on schedule and within targeted budgets and so on. Anything that is flagged as amber or red gets discussed at the governance group. The reason for the status has to be explained in the report submitted by the project sponsor.