The government has been criticised for failing to learn from
past failures on IT projects, a
lack of transparency and for refusing to drop projects that
aren't working.
The Public Accounts Committee, a group of MPs which oversees
public spending, said, "Numerous reports from this Committee have
highlighted that government can repeat the same mistakes and fail
to learn from the past."
Even when ways of capturing lessons have been introduced and
used, such as the OGC's gateway reviews process, projects have
still experienced problems. The reviews need to be published to
combat this, the MPs said.
"Government has also paid insufficient attention to analysing
the lessons from the reviews," the Committee said.
The prison service's
C-NOMIS project was an example of an innovation programme that
has "suffered from a lack of available project management skills
and a failure to nurture those they do have".
The barriers stopping effective learning from mistakes are,
according to the Committee:
Poor sharing of knowledge across organisational boundaries
Risk-averse attitudes which both stifle innovation and prevent
lessons being learned
Learning and innovation not being built routinely into staff
appraisals and competency frameworks
Too few ideas being generated from service users, suppliers and
other organisations, and their own front-line staff
Many staff considering they do not have the incentives to learn
or to innovate
The Committee said these problems could be overcome if gateway
reviews were published, increasing transparency around government
mistakes. The civil service needs a culture that encourages more
learning and innovation, and central government needs to drive
innovation forward. There also needs to be an effective way to
collect data on and effectively measure innovation and assess when
an activity is not working and should be stopped.
The Committee said, "Innovation involves trying new things, some
of which ultimately will not work. So experimentation is necessary,
but with public money at stake, government needs to be able to halt
ineffective activities quickly and learn lessons from them."