Edward Leigh, the chairman of the House of Commons Public
Accounts Committee, reads regular reports by the National Audit
Office on government IT failures. So it is natural that he should
feel exasperated.
But his frown was never more pronounced than at the start of a
recent hearing of his committee on
C-Nomis, an IT project run by the Home Office, the Ministry of
Justice and, to a lesser extent, services supplier EDS.
The system's main purpose has been to provide a single database
of offenders, to help with their management, from court appearances
to release, and sometimes beyond that.
But the
National Audit Office found that there was so little control of
C-Nomis that the government spent £161m on systems without anyone
knowing how or exactly on what.
Leigh knew in advance what the civil servant before him was
going to say in defence of C-Nomis: that the project's problems
were history and all was well now.
Leigh was facing Phil Wheatley, director general of the National
Offender Management Service in the Ministry of Justice. Leigh began
the hearing on C-Nomis by saying he has much respect for
Wheatley.
"Mr Wheatley," said Leigh. "You know that I have a very high
opinion of you personally, but this is a dreadful [NAO] report: a
delay of two years; a project which was supposed to cost £234m
which in fact is costing the taxpayer £513m; it was supposed to
deliver a single database and there will be three separate
databases.
"You will come with the classic defence line, that of course you
were not there, it is all in hand now, you have learned the
lessons, in the sort of school that permanent secretaries learn
when they come to this committee.
"However, I have had all this before and I just do not know
whether there is any point really carrying on, frankly."
Leigh did carry on, though. He asked why problems with IT
projects re-occur. "The same old lessons have not been learnt: over
ambitious, weak project management and all the rest. Give us an
honest answer."
Wheatley said the C-Nomis project was "badly run in the early
stages" but now "we are delivering a programme which will give us
real gains and which uses the taxpayers' money wisely".
To Wheatley's credit he helped Leigh and other MPs establish the
main causes of the failure of C-Nomis.
First, the project board met once every two months but did not
manage the project because it accepted the programme team's
assurances that the scheme was delivering on time and to
budget.
Second, accurate reports to ministers on the problems were
non-existent. Alan Williams, a senior member of the committee, said
it was "incredible that for three years nobody senior knew what was
being delivered for the money spent". Wheatley replied that people
had asked questions but were told that "actually the programme was
all going well".
Third, C-Nomis was managed as an IT project, not an IT-enabled
change programme.
Fourth, the senior responsible owner of the project had never
run an IT project before. MPs on the committee were unable to
ascertain why she had been appointed SRO. She has since left the
Civil Service.
At the end of hearing a still-frowning Edward Leigh was more
exasperated than at any time we have known.
"Clearly this project was handled badly, it achieved poor value
for money, many of the causes of delays and cost overruns could
have been avoided. I could make some grand eloquent statement about
how we never expect to see this happen again in the Civil Service,
but I suspect I would be
wasting my breath."
What Leigh didn't know - and it would not have been prudent to
have pointed it out to him at that time - was that his hearing on
C-Nomis came 26 years after the same committee began its first
inquiry into apparently systematic failures of government IT
projects.
The
Office of Government Commerce says that the management of IT
projects is better today than ever. Tell that to Edward Leigh.
Nomis - National Offender Management Information System - National
Audit Office report >>
C-Nomis trumps our satire >>
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