Computer Weekly campaigns to enforce best practice in public
sector project management
The UK must legislate to force the public sector's compliance with
best practice in IT project management. This is the main aim of a
campaign by Computer Weekly to fight the prolonged malaise of IT
disasters in government.
It is also the centrepiece of a submission by Computer Weekly to a
Parliamentary committee that is examining Whitehall IT projects.
The submission comes a week after public spending watchdog the
National Audit Office highlighted an IT project failure at the
Criminal Records Bureau.
The call for legislation is based on experience in the US, where
the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act requires public sector organisations to
implement best practice in project management. It was introduced
after senator William Cohen saw that continuing IT disasters were
wasting public money and were due to long-standing systemic
problems such as a lack to attention to business processes when
introducing new systems.
The fundamental mistakes highlighted in last week's NAO report on
the CRB show that producing best practice advice is not enough.
Computer Weekly believes the UK needs legislation to ensure
transparent adherence to already well-known best practice across
all facets of public sector IT projects if it is to escape the
cycle of project delay and failure.
Commenting on the NAO report MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the
Public Accounts Committee, said, "The grim familiarity of this
story of the failings of a high-profile government IT project
should not diminish our anger that the CRB service was appallingly
planned and, in consequence, badly implemented."
The Commons' work and pensions subcommittee will look at how the
lessons learned from major projects may be relevant to reforms at
the Child Support Agency, and to a huge IT modernisation programme
in its parent organisation, the Department for Work and
Pensions.
Computer Weekly is also calling for Gateway reviews on the progress
of government projects to be made public. The proposal has been
prompted, in part, by past decisions of Gateway reviewers working
for the Office of Government Commerce to endorse the go-ahead of
systems that have gone live with calamitous results.
Paul Goodman, an MP on the DWP committee, supports Computer
Weekly's proposals.
A spokesman for the OGC said, "A Gateway review is conducted on a
confidential basis for the senior responsible owner of the project
concerned. Ownership of the report rests with them and not with the
OGC. This approach promotes an open and honest exchange between the
project and the gateway review teams."
Computer Weekly will support its campaign with oral evidence to the
committee on 23 February.
