By Nick Heath, 26 March 2009 16:32
NEWS
Westminster's approach to running large tech projects is akin to "trying to avoid a car crash by looking in the rear view mirror", a panel of chief civil servants and MPs concluded today.
John Hemming, member of the select committee on the modernisation of the House of Commons, said reports into projects by government agencies and parliamentary committees are often little more than post-mortems.
"The problem [with these projects] is that you cannot find out that something has gone wrong until after it has happened, so you can not correct it at the time," he told an event hosted by services company Steria in London today.
"It is like trying to avoid a car crash by looking in the rear view mirror.
"We have got to create a situation where ministers have to provide and be provided with satisfactory information about what is going on."
It was a view echoed by Richard Bacon, a member of the parliamentary spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee and a fierce critic of the £12.7bn programme to modernise NHS IT.
According to Bacon, the government needs to publicise the results of internal reviews of projects by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) so ministers are no longer able to sweep negative findings under the carpet, citing delays to £1.5bn-worth of farm payments caused by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) tech.
"What we need is more openness - the OGC was giving red light after red light to the RPA and the permanent secretary said 'A red light does not mean stop, it just means there are things that need addressing'," he said.
"In the public sector you get this willingness to grind onwards towards the abyss and some projects go on long past their sell-by date."
Bacon argued that as much information on projects as possible should be published online so Whitehall could be held to account, saying: "Just stick it all on the internet".
He also called for the UK to follow the approach of the US, which compels public bodies to give status reports on key milestones during major IT projects.
There was also agreement among public sector figures that political pressures should not be allowed to influence project timetables and technical decisions.
Bacon said: "It is also the speed at which ministers want results that is the problem: in the case of the RPA, it resulted in the choice to implement the dynamic hybrid system, the most complex system available, within the shortest available timetable.
"Senior officials in Defra and the RPA said that it would be a nightmare and they went ahead and created it anyway."
Barbara Moorhouse, director general of corporate resources for the Department for Transport, added civil servants can be reluctant to stick their head above the parapet.
"The public sector objective is not to get into trouble and to just bumble along," she said.
"I know from my own personal experience that saying anything unpopular to a minister, even as a senior civil servant, is very difficult."
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
'A red light does not mean stop, it just means there are things that need addressing'
so basically a red light doesn't stop the vehicle as it heads towards the chasm it just points out that there is no bridge and everyone inside will hurtle to their death if they continue, the vehicle then continues on it's way having taken this information on board trusting it will be addressed by the time the chasm is reached
well thats alright then, and to think I was worried
2. Graeme Teesdale
From personal experience, there is often a overtly uncontroversial stance taken by projects. Taking too much time to manage stakeholders, engaging with the business with too much emphasis on paradigms and other such blue brain thinking.
Perhaps the projects and IT should be left to those that know what the environment needs and not those that seek prescribed solutions by those supplying them.
3. anonymous
The trouble is that the people who make the decisions are invariably not competent to make them because thay just don't have the technical understanding of what's involved.
Too often, Government projects start off from an ill-defined requirement which then gets modified as it goes along - a certain guarantee for disaster.
4. Nicholas Gill
Well, another in a long list of problems with public sector projects. There is little value in just pointing, yet again, to this litany of failure. There is a solution but the government is incapable of grasping it.
With more years in ICT / systems development than most, I have observed the issues. I have tried writing to bodies such as the National Audit Office to no avail.
I feel a great sadness that the ongoing waste of public money can be avoided. But things have to change.
It all starts with the procurement where the seeds of failure are sown. And it continues and is exacerbated during the project.
I have my own practical proposals to address the issue. I wonder if anyone will want to hear when the focus is on after the event recriminations.
5. Chris Goodman
Lack of responsibility and lack of personal accountability compounded by complacency and lack of motivation is a major factor in public service failure. Unlike the private sector, failure in the public sector does not mean dismissal but likely promotion or, at worst, a sideways move.
Until this is addressed there will never be a successful forward looking public service.
6. misceng
Anonymous is right. The civil servants who specify these projects are not competent technically so they start off in the wrong direction. As a professional engineer and retired civil servant I suffered from this process. A system to computerise control of consultants fees essential to the work of project managers was devised by a committee which had no project managers included. The decision was to use PCs (too few of them) and the work of implementing it was given to a team of mainframe programmers. Some data was too difficult for them to computerise so it was left out. I left 18 months after the project went live but had still not got any usable data out of it.
It appears that the problem continues.
7. anonymous
I am motivated, not complacent, have responsibility and hold my self and my team accountable for the success of our project, gosh, does this mean I am not a civil servant? I was worried for a moment there- I thought I had been for the past 5 years!! Sorry mate - the situation you describe is the same one I found when working industry, its called "people" you get some good ones and some bad ones. The trick is not to let the bad ones derail multi million pound projects which span a few years or more.
8. Murray Hynd
Politics is all about marketing what you do right, and delegating what you do wrong.
A RED project milestone should trigger path escalation; Government IT project failures questions the competency of PMO structures, including any rationale of specifically requesting technical guidance from non-technical higher authority... could be argued it doesn't exist.
Side issue: the simultaneous dichotomy of being prescriptive and 'open to innovation' without really having an internal idea of what is impossible / achievable, with public servants leveraging highly paid consultants for advice: i.e. accountability delegation. Likewise with deciphering what is on offer and what/who will be the successful solution/bidder.
You want a successful Govt-IT project? Incentivise said public servants performance based on random governance team from silicon.com readers... IT bruised and hardened, and can suss a shovel from a spade.