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79 Assumptions Assumptions as necessary conditions, decisions or events outside the control of the organisation that need to be present for planned activities and objectives to be achieved. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID, n.d.) defines assumptions as conditions under which the development hypothesis, or strategy for achieving an objective, will hold true. A good assumption has three main features: 1.) it is important for achieving an activity or objective, 2.) certainty of occurrence is unknown and 3.), the project can redesign to make the assumption necessary. Assumptions need to occur to achieve set activities or objectives otherwise they become risks. When an assumption becomes a risk, it should be part of the risk management plan and mitigation plans should be put in place. Turbit (2005) observes that there is a tendency by most projects to let assumptions ‘morp’ into accepted facts. Assumptions can hold true or not, therefore action lists should be created to follow up assumptions in order to either approve or disapprove and make corrective action for success. Therefore, it is important to keep checking (monitoring) the validity of the assumptions to make sure that they are still preconditions for the success of your activities. Three parameters including confidence ; how sure a project is that the assumption is true or still holds, lead time ; how long it will take for a project to prove or disprove the assumption and impact ; if the assumption proves incorrect, how much work and effort is involved to assess and manage the project assumption (Turbit, 2005). The three parameters can be rated from 1 to 10 were 10 means the assumption is critical. The three parameter ratings should be added together to provide an Assumption rating (score). Using the ratings below, we can rate the Assumptions as: 9-10: Critical 7-9: High 5-7: Medium 3-4: Low Therefore projects can include a section on Assumption testing in their monitoring tools as shown below in table 11.