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Across the lifecycle

The question bank

Every question this publication asks, drawn from the framework and the articles, filtered by stage and by source, printable.

The seamThe assurance function and every other function it examines.

What the bank is for

This bank gathers the questions the assurance framework and the articles already ask, for use in one place at an assurance review, a decision gate, a handover review or an asset management review. It lists 204 questions, 94 from the tests under the framework's domains and 110 from the question sections that close 22 articles. Each is shown with the domain or article it comes from.

Choose a stage, a source or a word to narrow the list. The choice is kept in the page address, so a filtered view can be reopened, shared or printed as it stands.

A question is not a finding. It names something worth checking, and what the answer shows is for the person asking to establish and judge. The bank is not a list of mandatory requirements, a compliance certificate or an audit programme, and it does not replace professional judgement.

204 of 204 questions, from 45 sources.

The question bank

2026-10-01. projects-advisors.com/tools/questions

Filters
None. This is the complete bank.

Inception & Development

01.1 Need and outcome

  1. Find the document stating the outcome. If the only answer is a business case appendix nobody has opened since sanction, note that as the finding.
  2. Check whether the outcome is expressed as something measurable after handover, rather than as completion of the project.
  3. Establish who owns the outcome after the delivery organisation disbands. A named role, not a department.
  4. Compare the outcome as written at sanction with the outcome as described now. Drift between the two is normal; undocumented drift is the finding.

Inception & Development

01.2 The decision-making framework

  1. Ask for the documented decision-making criteria. Their absence is itself a nonconformity against ISO 55001:2024, not merely a weakness.
  2. Check that the criteria cover the whole life of the asset and not only capital cost. Criteria that stop at delivery will select assets that are cheap to build and expensive to own.
  3. Trace one significant option decision back through the criteria and confirm the recorded rationale matches them.
  4. Confirm delegation limits exist in writing, and test one commitment against them.
  5. Check the methods and tools used are stated, since the standard requires these alongside the criteria.

Inception & Development

01.3 Definition maturity and the estimate

  1. Find the declared estimate class. An estimate with no declared class cannot be assured, only re-performed.
  2. Test the declared class against the definition deliverables actually complete at the time, since deliverable maturity is the sole primary determinant of class.
  3. Confirm the correct industry addendum was applied. The building and general construction ranges do not apply to transport infrastructure, tunnels, dams, or one-of-a-kind assets such as stadiums and health facilities.
  4. Check the accuracy range travelled with the number into the sanction paper, and whether the board saw a range or a point.
  5. Establish whether contingency was set at a stated confidence level, and whether anyone senior understands that a P50 estimate is designed to be exceeded about half the time.

Inception & Development

01.4 Whole-life cost and the operating consequence

  1. Ask whether an operating cost estimate exists at all. Frequently it does not.
  2. Identify who produced it. An operating estimate produced by the delivery team, with no operator involvement, is a delivery assumption rather than a forecast.
  3. Check whether any design decision has been reversed or altered on operating cost grounds. If none ever has, whole-life costing is presentational.
  4. Confirm the financial and technical views of the asset use the same asset breakdown, since alignment between them is the subject of its own standard.

Inception & Development

01.5 Information requirements, set before design

  1. Find the organizational information requirements. Then check the asset information requirements derive from them rather than from a document schedule.
  2. Confirm the requirements name decisions, not deliverables. "Everything the contractor produces" is not a requirement.
  3. Check the date. Requirements issued after detailed design has begun are a compilation exercise.
  4. Establish whether operations were consulted, and whether anyone in operations can name the requirement.

Inception & Development

01.6 Sanction and the authority to stop

  1. Ask how many gates have been failed, deferred with conditions, or passed with conditions never subsequently closed. The last category is the most informative.
  2. Check whether the body approving the gate receives the estimate range or the estimate point.
  3. Establish whether the person chairing the gate carries delivery accountability. Where they do, note that the control and the thing being controlled share an owner.
  4. Confirm the gate criteria were set before the submission was prepared.

Inception & Development

Operations is told to take part in the business case. Nobody asks it to sign.

  1. Is the unit that will run the asset named in the business case?Not the department that will own it on paper; the unit that will staff it, maintain it and hold its recurrent budget. If it is not named, nobody can be asked to accept anything.
  2. Who wrote the operating estimate, and who adopted it?An estimate produced by the delivery team with the operating side consulted is a delivery assumption. Ask whether anybody on the operating side has stated that the figure is theirs.
  3. Which operating model does the estimate price?In-house or contracted, what service level, what hours. If the model is not written down, the estimate cannot be tested and cannot be adopted.
  4. Is the estimate built on a breakdown of the asset the operator will use?Ask whether it could be compared, line by line, with the first year's outturn.
  5. Which budget line will carry the cost from the first operating year, and who holds it?The funding statement should answer this by name. A confirmation that the organisation can afford it does not.
  6. What happens at the gate if the operating side has not accepted?If the answer is nothing, the acceptance is not a control. It is a courtesy.

Inception & Development

A lifecycle ratio nobody can check, and a conclusion that does not need it

  1. When a lifecycle ratio appears in a business case, ask what is inside each term and over how many years. If the answer is not immediately available, the ratio is decorative and the decision rests on something else.
  2. Where the answer is that nobody has a structure for saying what is inside each term, there is a free one. ICMS 3, the International Cost Management Standard, gives a classification and presentation structure for life cycle costs and, since its third edition, carbon alongside them. It was agreed by 49 professional bodies through the ICMS Coalition, and both the standard and its Basis for Conclusions are published without charge, which is not true of most of the alternatives.
  3. Ask whether the ratio is doing any work. If the recommendation would be identical at half the figure, the number is illustration rather than evidence, and should be presented that way.
  4. For any claim traced to a well-known source, check whether the source contains the analysis or merely mentions the number. The distinction is invisible at the point of citation and decisive afterwards.
  5. Ask what the operational involvement in design actually produced. Attendance at reviews is not the deliverable. A changed drawing is.

Inception & Development

Every appraisal can be right and the portfolio still wrong

  1. Ask for the portfolio objectives, and check whether they were written before or after the programmes they are said to govern. The dates settle it.
  2. Ask what the portfolio has declined, and when. Not deferred, declined.
  3. Ask on what basis two programmes in different sectors were compared the last time money was reallocated between them. If the answer describes delivery status rather than value, that is the finding.
  4. Ask which body owns the comparison. Where every programme has a sponsor and the portfolio has a secretariat, the comparison is nobody's and will be made by whoever is loudest at the right meeting.

Delivery & Controls

02.1 Baseline integrity

  1. Reconcile the current baseline to the sanctioned baseline in one continuous chain. The inability to do this is the finding, and it is common.
  2. Count the re-baselines and read the approval for each. Check who approved them and whether that person also owned the performance being re-based.
  3. Compare current forecast against the original sanction figure, not against the most recent baseline. This is usually the only number that surprises anybody.
  4. Check whether scope was removed to hold cost. Descoping presented as underspend is the most common quiet failure at this stage.

Delivery & Controls

02.2 Change, planned and unplanned

  1. Sample instructions, technical queries and site decisions that did not enter the change register, and test whether any altered cost, programme or operating characteristics.
  2. Check whether the change assessment considers operating consequence, or only capital cost and time.
  3. Establish whether changes are assessed before implementation or ratified afterwards. Retrospective approval rates tell you what the control actually is.
  4. Confirm planned changes to the asset management system itself are assessed for risk and carried out in a planned manner, which the second edition requires separately.

Delivery & Controls

02.3 Forecast credibility

  1. Plot the forecast over time. A flat line followed by a step is the signature of a suppressed forecast, not a well-controlled one.
  2. Check whether known risks that have already materialised are in the forecast or still in the risk register.
  3. Establish who is permitted to move the forecast, and whether that person reports to whoever is accountable for the number.
  4. Test contingency drawdown against progress. Contingency consumed faster than scope completed is an early and legible warning.

Delivery & Controls

02.4 Externally provided processes and services

  1. List what has been externally provided, including technologies and data services, not only contracted works and consultancy.
  2. For each, identify what the organisation retains that lets it verify performance independently of the provider.
  3. Check whether the owner holds more or less programme information than its tier one contractors. Where the imbalance is wide, note it as a transfer risk crystallising at handover rather than as a delivery issue.
  4. Confirm the contract requires the information the owner will need to operate, and not merely the information the provider finds convenient to produce.

Delivery & Controls

02.5 Interfaces between packages and functions

  1. Draw the interfaces. Then ask whose assurance scope each one falls inside. The ones falling inside nobody are the finding.
  2. Check whether any review has been scoped across two packages rather than within one.
  3. Test the schedule logic between packages, in particular where one package holds float that another package is relying on.
  4. Establish who owns interface risk in the contract structure, and whether that party has the information to manage it.

Delivery & Controls

02.6 Competence of whoever is assuring

  1. Read the team composition against the subject matter. Then read the conclusions and ask which of them required knowledge the team did not have.
  2. Where a specialist was used, check the reviewer retained responsibility for the conclusion rather than adopting the specialist opinion wholesale.
  3. Establish whether competence requirements were determined and documented before the work was scoped.
  4. Check whether the assurance provider has ever declined a scope on competence grounds. A provider that never has may not be assessing it.

Delivery & Controls

An extension of time is tested against records made during the delay

  1. When an event that may delay the works occurs, which document records it, who wrote it, and would a reader who was not there recognise it as a notice under the contract, or only as a description?
  2. Is the contract's notice period running from the event, or from when the delay became apparent, and has anyone written down which reading the team is relying on?
  3. Can each delay event be matched to the programme activities it affected, in the programme update closest to the date it occurred?
  4. Are the programme updates logic-linked and kept in their native form, so that somebody can later reconstruct which chain of activities was driving completion?
  5. Is every oral instruction confirmed in writing with its date, and does the owner keep its own record of instructions, approvals, access and information it issued?
  6. Are daily and progress records factual, and signed by both parties where that is practicable?
  7. Does the contract provide an extension of time for each kind of act or omission by the owner, and does it say anything about concurrent delay?

Delivery & Controls

The score that is not a number

  1. Take one judgement-based criterion and ask what a bidder would have had to submit to move from 14 to 17. If the solicitation cannot answer, the criterion measures preference, and the weighting multiplies it.
  2. For a criterion on the team, apply the directive's test: can the quality of the staff assigned have a significant impact on the performance of this contract?
  3. Ask for the evaluation minute. Check whether it gives reasons for scores or only for the committee's recommendations and any dissent, which is what Article 45(3) requires.
  4. Take one recorded reason and find the page of the proposal it refers to. If the reason cannot be located in the proposal, the record cannot be reviewed, whatever the score.
  5. Check what a losing bidder received under Regulations Article 85(2): its technical scores, and whether anything explained them.
  6. Look for the Article 86 committee's past decisions where the Regulations say they are made available, and whether any of them turned on a technical evaluation.

Delivery & Controls

Private projects overrun too. The difference is who counts.

  1. Ask who, by name, answers for the land, the design, the money and the decision. If the answer is four organisations, the project has the structure the auditors' findings describe, whoever owns it.
  2. Ask whether the execution period was set to the appropriation or to the work. If to the appropriation, the schedule has an extension built in, and the recovery plan should say so.
  3. Ask what the studies, land, permits and approvals looked like on the day the contract was signed. The Jordanian Bureau's recurring findings are the checklist, and five of the six are things done or not done before anybody tendered: were the designs checked against the site, was the duration calculated rather than assumed, was there prior coordination with the other bodies concerned, were the approvals and licences obtained, and did the employer resource its own supervision.
  4. Ask, of anything already finished, whether it is occupied. The Bureau's sixth finding is completed projects standing empty for want of the employer's own approvals, which is a cost with no contractor in it at all, and the one an owner is least likely to have counted.
  5. Ask what will be counted at the end, against which baseline, and who will see it. If the answer is the latest approved baseline, the project will finish on time by definition.
  6. Ask, of any private project held up as the model, what it cost against its first approved budget. If nobody can say, that is the difference.

Delivery & Controls

The payment chain is a loan, and the contractor is the lender

  1. Take each period in your governing rule and write the unit beside it. If two periods in one chain have different units, the total cannot be stated in either without a conversion, and somebody has been stating it anyway.
  2. Where you are working from a translation, check the periods against the enacted text. A translation that declares its conventions has told you what it does; it has not told you what it did by accident.
  3. Ask who bears the restart when a payment order is returned for amendment. If the contractor does, every query is a free extension for the payer, and the query does not have to be a large one.
  4. Ask whether an advance payment is on offer, what percentage, and what the guarantee will cost, because that is the only part of the chain the contractor can negotiate before signing.
  5. Put your own submission dates against your own holiday calendar before the programme is fixed, rather than after a certificate has landed badly. A monthly cycle has 12 submission dates a year and they are not equally priced.
  6. Ask what the second and third verifications have found in the last year that the first missed. If nobody can say, the cost of the chain is being paid for a control nobody has measured.

Delivery & Controls

Reliability can be specified like mass. Building owners do not.

  1. Ask for the O&M data specification the project is using and search it for the words reliability, failure rate and expected life. If the answer is what it was above, nothing the contractor delivers will carry a lifecycle figure, however complete the manuals.
  2. Ask whether repair work-hours have been specified without failure frequency. If so, the sheet will say what a repair costs and not what the plant costs to keep running, which is the figure the business case needed.
  3. Where a supplier quotes a life, ask for the method and the population. A figure with neither is marketing.
  4. Ask whether the asset information requirements name the failure-mode taxonomy the maintenance system will record against, and whether the supplier's documentation uses the same one. If the two do not meet, the owner's own data will never accumulate into anything analysable.
  5. Ask whether anything in the estate has ever been procured against a stated reliability requirement with verification. If the answer is no, that is the finding, and it says nothing about the suppliers.

Delivery & Controls

The certified value and the booked value are two different records

  1. Ask for the reconciliation, by project, for last month. If it does not exist, the two records have never been compared and the balance is whatever the ledger says it is.
  2. Ask who owns it, by name, and which function they sit in. A control that belongs to nobody is the pattern in every finding above.
  3. Ask for the ageing of the balance. A project with a taking-over certificate on file and a balance still in work in progress is the 1968 waterway, earlier in its life.
  4. Ask whether any balance is negative. An asset account cannot be, and each one is an unresolved posting error with a date on it.
  5. Ask how differences were resolved. If the answer is that the ledger was adjusted to match the other record, ask how anyone knew which record was right. That is the Fort Shafter answer, and it was a finding in 1993.
  6. Ask what happened at the last system migration. Balances carried into a new system without their supporting detail are the 1.022bn the Corps could not find in 2003.

Delivery & Controls

Moving a date is not the same as re-planning

  1. What does the extension itself cost, before attribution?Not who pays. What it costs. Attribution is a separate and later argument, and conducting it first is how the cost question gets lost.
  2. Was the revised date produced by re-running the logic, or by moving the dates?The distinction is visible in the file. A schedule re-run against retained logic behaves differently from one whose activities have been dragged.
  3. What is the confidence level of the new date?If the original date was a commitment and the revised date is also a commitment, then either the risk has genuinely gone or nobody has looked. A revised date produced without a schedule risk analysis is, on GAO's own test, not yet credible.

Delivery & Controls

The critical path cannot show a delay nobody scheduled

  1. Ask whether the schedule contains the owner's activities. Count them. Then check whether they carry predecessors and successors, because an unlinked activity is decoration.
  2. Sort by total float and look at both ends. Negative float means the network is already impossible. Very high float usually means logic is missing.
  3. Ask for the basis document. If none exists, the constraints and lags in the schedule have no recorded justification, and constraints are where inconvenient logic goes to be hidden.
  4. Ask what confidence level the completion date carries, and for the analysis that produced it.
  5. Ask who maintains the integrated schedule. If the answer is the contractor, the owner is being told about its own programme by the party whose performance the programme measures.

Delivery & Controls

Your contingency and their contingency are different money

  1. Ask both parties to define contingency in writing, separately, before comparing. The disagreement is the finding and it takes ten minutes to surface.
  2. Ask what the contingency covers and what it excludes. An allowance for scope that is known but not yet priced belongs in the estimate, not in contingency, and putting it there conceals a scope gap as a risk provision.
  3. Ask what confidence level the total represents and who calculated it.
  4. Trace the layers. Ask each contributor what they added and whether they could see what anybody else had added.
  5. Compare drawdown against progress. Contingency consumed faster than scope completed is the earliest legible warning a programme gives, and it is legible months before the forecast moves.

Handover & Transition

03.1 Information transfer against stated requirements

  1. Compare the delivered information against the asset information requirements, not against the document register.
  2. Have a competent person who was not involved attempt to answer three operating questions using only what was supplied. This test is cheap and almost nobody runs it.
  3. Check whether the accepting signature belongs to the receiving organisation or to the delivering one.
  4. Sample as-built records against physical reality in a small number of locations. Late substitutions and field modifications are the usual gap.

Handover & Transition

03.2 Knowledge, as distinct from information

  1. Ask, in writing and before demobilisation, what was accepted rather than resolved. People generally answer a direct question.
  2. Check whether design intent is recorded anywhere other than in the drawings.
  3. Identify which individuals hold undocumented knowledge and whether any mechanism exists to transfer it before they leave. Usually the mechanism is a leaving date.
  4. Test whether the organisation has determined what knowledge is necessary for the operation of its assets, which the second edition now requires explicitly.

Handover & Transition

03.3 Taking over, and what was waived to achieve it

  1. Read the taking-over certificate against the conditions in the contract. List what was outstanding at the date of issue.
  2. For each outstanding item, find who accepted it and what was recorded about the consequence.
  3. Check whether the Engineer issued the Notice of No-objection on the as-built records and the manuals, where the contract requires it.
  4. Establish whether any route to deemed taking over was relied on, and if so whether the information obligations were satisfied by another means.

Handover & Transition

03.4 Recognition onto the asset register

  1. Take ten assets from the financial register and locate them physically. Then take ten physical assets and locate them in the register. The second direction usually fails first.
  2. Compare the componentisation used for depreciation against the breakdown used for maintenance. Where they differ, establish which one anybody actually manages the asset by.
  3. Check the valuation basis and whether it is supportable from the delivery record or was derived by apportionment.
  4. Confirm that data can be traced between financial and non-financial sources.

Handover & Transition

03.5 Operational readiness of the organisation

  1. Check whether the operating roles are filled, not whether they are defined. A structure chart is not readiness.
  2. Establish the lead time on the longest operational dependency, usually a systems implementation or a term maintenance contract, and compare it to the handover date.
  3. Confirm training was delivered to the people who will do the work rather than to whoever was available.
  4. Test whether the operator can raise, approve and pay for a corrective work order on day one.

Handover & Transition

A delivered file is not an accepted record

  1. What does the contract test at handover?Read the clause that releases the certificate or closes the deliverable. If it tests supply and absence of objection, it tests receipt, and the other three are somebody else's to arrange.
  2. Is there a receiving schema, and does the contract refer to it?A list of documents is not a schema. Ask for the attribute list the receiving system will reject on.
  3. Who owns the mapping between the physical tag, the project code, the financial record and the operational record?If the answer is a spreadsheet with no named owner, the identifier test has nothing to run against.
  4. Has any delivered asset been used in a transaction?Choose one asset, raise a test work order against it in the receiving system, and see whether it plans, assigns and closes. The result is a yes or a no.
  5. Which of the six locations would a failure here sit in?A production failure is a contractual matter. The other five need a different owner and a different remedy, and finding which one applies decides who has to act.

Handover & Transition

The project crosswalk reaches capitalisation. What survives it?

  1. Is the identifier carried, derived, or created again?Carried means the same string appears on both sides. Derived means a rule turns one into the other and the rule is written down. Created again means somebody read one system and typed into another.
  2. Where does the mapping live, and can it be opened by a second person?A mapping held in one person's working file is a different control from a mapping held in a system, and the difference shows up when that person is not there.
  3. Who is answerable for it after capitalisation?The project answer is usually available, because the documents above require one, and the Saudi manual names finance for the transfer itself. The question is what the answer becomes once the cost has been transferred and the project has closed.

Handover & Transition

The evidence finance needs is in a file finance never sees

  1. Ask who receives the final commissioning report, by name. If the distribution list has no one from finance on it, the evidence and the judgment are not connected on your project.
  2. Ask what evidence supported the last work in progress transfer. If the answer is the taking over certificate alone, ask whether a commissioning report existed at the time. The gap between those two answers is the finding.
  3. Ask whether warranty start dates in the register trace to energisation records. If warranties were logged from the handover date instead, some coverage is shorter than the register believes.
  4. At the next project, put the commissioning report on the finance team's document list at design stage, when adding a recipient costs a line in a table. The same list should already have operations on it.

Handover & Transition

The only test the building ever gets

  1. Ask which commissioning model the project has actually bought. If commissioning first appears in the programme during construction, it is the traditional model regardless of what the specification calls it, and the design was never reviewed against testable requirements.
  2. Ask who the commissioning authority reports to. A reporting line into the contractor is not a variant of the process model. It is the thing the process model was created to remove.
  3. Ask for the owner's project requirements in the form the tests will reference. If they do not exist, the tests will verify the design against itself.
  4. Ask what happens after occupancy: whether seasonal deferred testing is in the contract and whether a return review is scheduled roughly 10 months in. These are the cheapest rows in the whole process, and their absence is the commonest saving.
  5. If the fee is challenged, put the LBNL numbers on the table with their caveats attached, and ask the challenger which other assurance line item on the project can produce any measured payback at all.

Handover & Transition

The date a project becomes an asset is not the date on the certificate

  1. Ask who sets the transfer date, by name. If the answer is that finance takes it from the completion certificate, the capability test is not being applied, it is being approximated.
  2. Ask for the ageing of the work in progress balance. Anything sitting there beyond the construction period is either an asset that should have transferred or a cost that should have been written off, and neither improves with time.
  3. Ask whether anything has ever transferred on a date other than a certificate date. If not, judgement is not being exercised anywhere in the process.
  4. Ask what the capitalisation threshold is and whether the register obeys it. Then ask what it cost to inventory the items that fall below it.

Handover & Transition

Completion describes the asset. Readiness describes the owner.

  1. Ask to see the owner's requirements in the form commissioning will test them against. If they are adjectives, readiness cannot be demonstrated, only asserted.
  2. Ask who is entitled to declare readiness, and whether that person carries any consequence if it turns out to be wrong.
  3. Ask for the operations readiness programme as a dated plan with named owners, separate from the construction programme. Its absence is the finding, and absence is the normal case.
  4. Test the pack with a stranger. Whether a competent person who was not involved could operate the asset from what has been supplied is the only honest test, it costs almost nothing, and almost nobody runs it.
  5. Ask when the first post occupancy review is scheduled. If the answer is that none is, readiness was never going to be checked, only declared.

Handover & Transition

Under FIDIC, taking over comes before acceptance

  1. Establish the three dates and write them down: taking over, expected performance certificate and, on a Saudi project, the occupancy certificate that starts the statutory clock. They are frequently held by three different teams.
  2. Check what the insurance position is on the day after taking over. The contractor's cover of the works ends there, and the owner's operational policy is not always in force on the same date.
  3. Ask who is briefed to keep operating records as evidence during the defects period, and whether anybody has told the operations team that is part of the job.
  4. Confirm the retention and bond release schedule against the defects period, rather than against completion. Instruments released early are not recoverable by argument later.
  5. For statutory liability, confirm which entities carry it and whether they will still exist in year eight. A ten-year liability against a project-specific company is a liability against nothing.

Operations & Asset Management

04.1 An asset management system that is scoped

  1. Ask for the documented scope of the asset management system and the boundaries and applicability used to set it.
  2. Identify asset classes falling outside it and establish whether that exclusion was decided or merely happened.
  3. Check the scope is available as documented information, which the standard requires.
  4. Test whether the system covers non-physical assets where the organisation depends on them.

Operations & Asset Management

04.2 The SAMP and the line back to organisational objectives

  1. Trace one asset management objective up to an organisational objective and down to a funded activity. Breaks in this chain are usually at the top.
  2. Check the SAMP documents the role of the asset management system in meeting the objectives, which is what the clause asks for.
  3. Establish when it was last revised, and whether it changed anything.
  4. Confirm objectives are measurable and monitored, rather than aspirational statements.

Operations & Asset Management

04.3 Asset data and its quality

  1. Ask what data quality standard has been determined. The absence of one is now a nonconformity rather than a maturity observation.
  2. Check when each significant data set was last verified against the physical asset, and by whom.
  3. Establish whether data requirements were derived from the decisions the data supports, or from what the system happened to have fields for.
  4. Test alignment of terminology between financial and non-financial data, which the clause requires explicitly.

Operations & Asset Management

04.4 Performance evaluation and internal audit of the system

  1. Read the internal audit plan and identify what proportion of assurance effort is directed at the asset base relative to its share of the balance sheet.
  2. Check whether the audit programme considers the importance of the processes concerned and the results of previous audits, which the clause requires.
  3. Establish whether the auditors are competent in asset management, or competent in audit and reading across.
  4. Confirm management review inputs include what the standard specifies, and that outputs changed something.

Operations & Asset Management

04.5 Predictive action

  1. Ask for one intervention whose timing was set by predicted condition rather than by failure, calendar or budget availability.
  2. Check whether renewal, replacement and disposal timing is optimised together or handled by separate teams on separate cycles.
  3. Establish whether the data required to predict anything is actually being collected, and at what interval.
  4. Test whether deferred maintenance is quantified and reported anywhere the board sees it.

Operations & Asset Management

04.6 Alignment of the financial and technical view

  1. Take the total asset value from the financial statements and the asset population from the maintenance system, and attempt a reconciliation. Record how long it takes and who has to be involved.
  2. Check whether the two functions share an asset hierarchy, or maintain separate ones nobody maps.
  3. Establish whether a proposed renewal can be expressed in both views without manual translation.
  4. Confirm whether accrual conversion, where it applies, produced a register the engineers recognise.

Operations & Asset Management

What capital figures record, and what they leave elsewhere

  1. Is this a flow of spending or a stock of assets, and in current or constant prices?
  2. Is it gross or net of consumption of fixed capital?
  3. Which record holds the date each asset became available for use?
  4. Where does this organisation record routine maintenance, and where does it record replacement?
  5. Which register and which contracts carry the asset's information once the project team has gone?
  6. Where will disposal and site restoration be recorded, and by whom?

Operations & Asset Management

Counting desks while the useful life goes unexamined

  1. Ask when the useful lives were last reviewed, and what changed. If the answer is that they were set at conversion and carried forward, the annual review required by paragraph 48 is not happening, whatever the policy says.
  2. Ask whether any building is componentised. Then ask whether the components were chosen for depreciation or for maintenance, because the two breakdowns rarely coincide and only one of them is in the ledger.
  3. Ask what the capitalisation threshold is, when it was set, and against what reasoning. A threshold inherited without review is not a judgement, and paragraph 8 assumes a judgement was made.
  4. Compare the cost of the last inventory exercise with the value of the assets it added to the register. Where the first exceeds the second, the exercise has consumed more than it recorded.

Operations & Asset Management

An entity is asked for four asset registers and builds one

  1. Ask how many asset registers exist, and then ask to see them. The common answer is one, described as serving both purposes, which usually means it serves reporting and is consulted by nobody in operations.
  2. Ask whether the register carries a criticality rating. If it does not, it is a financial record whatever it is called, and no maintenance decision can be made from it. If it does, ask what the ratings were derived from. A criticality column populated without a strategic asset management plan behind it is an opinion formatted as data.
  3. Ask which register the entity is currently able to complete, and whether the sequence is understood as a sequence. An entity building its first financial register and being asked simultaneously for technical attributes will produce a poor version of both.
  4. Ask whether it carries replacement value. A register with original cost and no replacement value cannot support a renewal plan.
  5. For anything below the capitalisation threshold, ask which register it sits on and what that register is for. If the answer is the fixed asset register, the threshold is not being applied and somebody is depreciating furniture.

Computed from

  • Global Internal Audit Standards, Institute of Internal Auditors (2024 Global Internal Audit Standards; read 2026-08-20)https://www.theiia.org/en/standards/2024-standards/global-internal-audit-standards/
  • IPA Gate Review 4, Readiness for Service, workbook and templates (OGC Gateway 4 workbook, hosted unchanged; read 2026-08-27)https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ogc-gateway-review-4-readiness-for-service-guidance-and-templates
  • NASA Software Engineering Handbook, Operational Readiness Review criteria (NPR 7150.2 handbook, live page; read 2026-08-27)https://swehb.nasa.gov/spaces/7150/pages/140640476/7.9+-+Entrance+and+Exit+Criteria

How the bank is built

How questions enter
A question is listed when it appears among the tests of a framework domain, or in the closing section of an article headed “What to ask” or “What to examine”. Nothing is written for the bank itself: a question changes when its source changes.
How the counts are made
The totals are counted from those sources each time the site is built, so they move when a domain or an article is added.
How origins are shown
Each group is headed by the framework domain or article its questions come from, linked, so every question can be read beside the reasoning that produced it.
Revised
26 September 2026
Limits
The bank holds what this publication has written about, not every question a programme should face, and a question filed under one stage can matter at another.

Cite this page

Projects Advisors, “The question bank,” revised 26 September 2026, https://projects-advisors.com/tools/questions

Related resources

The bank states what to ask. These pages do the work beside it.

  • The mapShows how the subjects connect across the lifecycle.
  • Asset register packageThe financial and technical registers, which share the asset tag, and the crosswalk that joins their rows, generated as one workbook.
  • The standing registerIdentifies what each published claim rests on.