The recent woes of the Rural Payments Agency offered a
new insight on why government projects fail, with both the current
head of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and
the minister responsible at the time admitting that there was "a
conspiracy of optimism" among the civil servants
involved.
A partial explanation for this fatal state of mind came in
former Defra minister Lord Whitty's comment that officials gave a
rosy view because "they felt that was the message they needed to
give to those who were overseeing them".
By coincidence, a clearer reason for this sort of behaviour was
provided by a senior, now ex-civil servant, Carne Ross, in his
evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Iraq war.
He noticed a tendency for officials "to tell ministers what they
wish to hear in order to advance their own individual prospects....
in order to get promoted you have to show yourself as being
sympathetic in identifying with the views of ministers and, in
particular, the prime minister."
A recipe for disaster
Couple this with the fact that a senior civil servant is almost
certain to be moved before the chickens resulting from their
decisions come home to roost, and you have a clear recipe for
disaster a recipe that has consistently delivered failure after
failure in the government sector in the past 20 years.
You can have all the procedures and gateways in place, but if
you have gung-ho civil servants and ministers with no experience of
running a large-scale operational business who ignore these warning
signs, then you are going to go on repeating the same mistakes over
and over again.
A simple solution
The answer to the problem is simple: tell senior civil servants
and their ministers that they are not moving post until they have
successfully delivered on their current project, and set
appropriate measures for determining success. You will then get a
much more pragmatic and sensible approach to system
development.
The ideal senior management team for kicking off a project is
one which has just had - or almost had - a disaster, and one which
knows it will still be around when the new project is delivered.
You then get sensible and pragmatic decisions, rather than
exercises in wishful thinking.
Ministers need to realise that success comes, not from pouring
ever-larger sums of money into the never satisfied maws of large
consultancy firms in the naïve belief that the private sector knows
what it is doing.
Rather, it comes from running small-scale pilots involving the
users - both internal and external - at every stage, driving out
complexity, and above all, taking the time to negotiate contracts
so they do not turn into the open-ended gravy trains that still
seem to characterise most government IT projects.
Richard Collings is an independent consultant working with
smaller government agencies and larger charities on specifying,
procuring and rolling out complex information systems
Have your say
Do you agree with Richard Collings' views? If you have an opinion
about this or any article in Computer Weekly, e-mail
computer.weekly@rbi.c.uk
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk