- Foreword and Introduction
- 1: Putting projects in context
- 2: Entity arrangements
- 2.1 Strategic alignment
- 2.2 People and culture
- 2.3 Effective governance
- 2.4 Common APS Requirements
- Summary for entity arrangements
- 3: Individual project proposals
- 3.1 Clarifying the concept
- 3.2 The business case
- 3.3 Approving the project
- Summary for individual projects
- 4: Project implementation
- Appendices
- Quick reference card
PDF version of guide [3.0MB]
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Tips for PDF and HTML versions [0.5MB]
Word version of checklists [0.1MB]
Data stewardship
Better Practice results: Reduced incidence of data integrity and ownership problems; successful retirement of, or integration with, legacy data stores.
Most program delivery and business projects involve the processing of data. The data may be stored and used for many years. It may be initially captured and stored for one purpose, but subsequently be of interest for other purposes. As a result, there are often complex issues surrounding data ownership, privacy and definition.
More generally, data is a valuable organisational asset which requires protection, and control over its quality. Subject to consideration of data ownership and privacy, an entity’s collective data holdings may provide opportunities to better inform policy making and improve program delivery and client service.
In that context, an important contributor to effective planning and approval of individual projects is that an entity has effective governance arrangements for the data it uses – both the data held by the entity and the data it needs that is held by other parties. It is better practice that:
- there are corporate policies to assure that data requirements are identified, and any restrictions on data use are specified;
- responsibilities for entity-level oversight of the collection, management and maintenance of data are allocated; and
- planning processes for projects involve those responsible for the data being used by the project, and include consideration of the potential usage, updating, protection, and archiving of the data.
As well as shared data, some entities have business processes used by more than one program or business function, such as making payments, receiving grant applications, and registering a client. Particularly for larger entities, explicit governance of shared business processes helps contribute to the effective planning and approval of projects.
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