Stolt Group Information

Australia's major Defence programs continue to experience persistent cost growth and schedule slippage, not because governance frameworks are absent, but because the conditions that produce failure develop well before they become visible in conventional performance data. The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) Major Projects Report recorded 442 months of cumulative schedule slippage across monitored programs in 2023–24. These programs operated within mature Earned Value Management, assurance, and review frameworks. The issue is not a lack of governance, it is the gap between when systemic integrity conditions begin to degrade and when that degradation surfaces in cost and schedule reporting. By the time Earned Value Management produces a forecast that demands intervention, the conditions generating that forecast have typically been present for months. By the time an independent assurance review identifies evidence gaps, the underlying governance erosion has already occurred. Program recovery is significantly more costly than early intervention, yet the mechanisms for early intervention are rarely available to the decision-makers who need them. The creation of the Defence Delivery Agency (DDA) from 1 July 2026, with an explicit mandate for early visibility of risk before issues escalate, signals that Australian Defence leadership recognises this gap and intends to close it. Stolt Group's Program Integrity Method (PIM) is a proprietary governance and assurance framework developed for precisely this problem: a predictive assessment of the systemic conditions that determine program outcomes, providing decision-makers with advance visibility across five integrity domains, before cost and schedule degradation becomes measurable. stoltgroup.com.au | enquiries@stoltgroup.com.au