A £234m“C-Nomis” IT system for Prisons failed
in almost every possible way – but the project’s main board and
ministers were kept unaware of the full problems until it was too
late to rescue the original scheme.
The
National Audit Office published today an incisive report on the
Home Office’s National
Offender Management Information System [C-Nomis] which showed
that bad news about the project failed to go up the ladder of
command to those who could have made decisions to rescue it.
In its early stages the project was “consistently” rated as green
meaning that it was officially assessed as proceeding to time and
to budget, said the NAO. Later, two Gateway reviews of the scheme
by the Office of Government Commerce put the project’s status at
“red”. But the NAO found that the OGC’s advice was sidelined or not
always acted on.
The NAO referred to a “vacuum of leadership” on the project.
Tim Burr, head of the National Audit Office, said the C-Nomis
initiative to introduce a single offender database “has been
expensive and ultimately unsuccessful”. He said the problems had
been avoidable - officials at the Home Office had failed to follow
“basic” project management principles, or establish a realistic
budget, timescales and governance.
The NAO concluded that the technical complexity had been
“significantly underestimated”. C-Nomis was treated as an IT
project and not a business-change programme, project management was
poor, and contracts with suppliers were weak. There were 800
change requests in 2005 and 2006.
Edward Leigh, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said of
C-Nomis that “kindergarten mistakes” had been repeated: “This
Committee hears of troubled government projects all too frequently.
But the litany of failings in this case are in a class of their
own.
“All of this mess could have been avoided if good practice in
project management had been followed. A new project team has been
brought in. They cannot afford to repeat these kindergarten
mistakes.”
The project began in June 2004. But it was not until the summer of
2007 that senior officials and ministers in the newly-formed
Ministry of Justice discovered that C-Nomis was running two years
late and that costs had more than doubled from £234m to a projected
£690m over the lifetime of the scheme. They suspended the
IT project and
launched a review into how costs could be cut.
Talks with the main
supplier EDS began on how C-Nomis could be saved without making
it unaffordable.
The NAO said that until the project was suspended in 2007 “we found
no evidence of Ministerial involvement beyond them receiving
standard summarised briefings”. The NAO added: “When delays
occurred many stakeholders only found out at the last
minute”.
It’s a similar story to the Rural Payment Agency’s IT-based Single
Payment Scheme in which ministers were given reassuring reports on
progress until it was too late to hide the seriousness of the
project’s difficulties.
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