"We have taken evidence on cases of poor decision taking and weak project management on many occasions. The same lessons have still not been learnt, making the management by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) of C-Nomis a prime example of how not to develop a project."

"From the outset those responsible failed to identify the modifications required to the
software to meet NOMS' needs. The Home Office assessed it as broadly meeting the needs of the prison service, but as a North American product the software needed to be adapted for UK legislation.

"In respect of probation, there was a serious failure to understand the magnitude and cost of the changes which would be needed, even though the Home Office recognised at the start that the software met only 29% of the needs of the Probation Service.  The estimated cost of developing the C-NOMIS application rose from £99m in 2005 to £254m by July 2007 due to customisation."

"The programme team running C-NOMIS reported that the programme was delivering on time and to budget, when it was not."

"In May 2005, as part of the C-NOMIS project approval process, the Home Office's
Programme and Project Management Support Unit certified the C-NOMIS project as not suffering from the eight common causes of project failure. Subsequent analysis of the underlying causes of the costs increases and delay by the National Audit Office indicated that C-NOMIS suffered from four of the eight common causes of project failure in full and three in part."

"Planning for the C-NOMIS project was unrealistic, in part because of an over
optimistic 'good news' culture which was not challenged with sufficient rigour by
senior management with in-depth knowledge of the business."

"The first Senior Responsible Owner and other senior people involved with C-NOMIS demonstrated a remarkable lack of insight and rigour, coupled with naivety and over-optimism."

"Contracts were agreed with suppliers without testing the market through a competitive tendering process, and the contracts themselves were weak." [changes went undocumented and tens of millions of pounds cannot be accounted for]

"To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, Departments must use existing guidance."

"The original cost estimate rose from £234 million in 2005 to £690 million in July 2007. NOMS [National Offender Management Service] agreed that, with hindsight, there had been a gross underestimate of costs and that the original cost estimates were badly prepared... The NOMIS programme was revised and scaled back to three offender databases for £513m, for delivery by 2011."

"Financial management was almost non-existent. The project did not have a dedicated
financial team until 2007 and no-one was actively monitoring the budget.

"As a result, NOMS cannot provide the detail to say what the £161m used to October 2007 was spent on, although can say in broad terms that EDS was paid £87m and the remainder went on a combination of payments to other suppliers and NOMS costs."

"In 2003, Lord Carter's Correctional Services Review recommended bringing together prisons and probation services and introducing 'end-to-end offender management'. This change was designed to improve the supervision of individual offenders throughout their sentence by a single offender manager ...The National Offender Management Service, initially part of the Home Office and since May 2007, part of the Ministry of Justice, was created in June 2004 to bring this about.

"Some five years later, the information systems required to support offender management are still not in place."

"The individuals who took the key decisions on C-NOMIS and were responsible for its monitoring and oversight have all retired or moved on, and no-one has been held to account for the estimated £41 million wasted due to delays and cost overruns."

"The original concept was ambitious but still technically feasible. Problems at every level, however, led to an out of control programme which eventually NOMS could no longer afford. NOMS significantly underestimated the technical complexity of the project."

"Rather than invest time and resources to develop and standardise the new ways of operating across its business areas, NOMS sought an IT system to unify the business and achieve end-to-end offender management.

"There was no sustained effort by NOMS to simplify and standardise its business processes reflecting management's misplaced confidence in C-NOMIS, their unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved by an IT solution and their underestimation of the time and costs to deliver it."

"NOMS should have thought through its business processes and introduced new,
standardised ways of working in conjunction with new IT support systems to
deliver end to end offender management."

"[There is a need to] standardise ways of working to avoid excessive customisation."

"Costs and progress were not monitored or reported for the first 3 years after the inception of C-NOMIS ... The Project Board, the NOMS Board, the Home Office senior management and Ministers were all unaware of the true cost and progress before May 2007."

"[The] Home Office's senior management at the time was wrong to appoint somebody
as Senior Responsible Owner who did not have the skills or relevant experience, without also providing support and allowing the post holder time to carry out their responsibilities."

"The vacuum of leadership within NOMS contributed to confusion and created challenges for suppliers and the project team. The roles and responsibilities of the project team, the Offender Information Services (OIS) and NOMS business areas were unclear.

"For example, the part of NOMS responsible for administering the funding, the OIS, and the project team each thought the other was monitoring expenditure. The Project Board, chaired by the Senior Responsible Owner, was too large to be effective and had little contact with the project team.

"It did not actively manage delivery and it did not discuss programme finance until April 2007, almost 3 years after the start of the C-NOMIS pilot phase."

"NOMS has assured us that it has implemented the changes needed to deliver the revised NOMIS programme by 2011. However, there are significant challenges yet to address including further contract negotiations with suppliers ..." 

"It is deeply depressing that after numerous highly critical PAC reports on IT projects in recent years, the same mistakes have occurred once again."

"We question the purpose of our hard work if Whitehall accepts all our recommendations but still cannot ensure a minimum standard of competence."

"Too much rested on the performance of a few key individuals to deliver success."

"NOMS did not respond with sufficient vigour to the Gateway review in 2006 that
raised serious concerns about the delivery of the project."

"Despite the intentions, there will not be an integrated information system
providing a single offender record that will be accessible by all service providers
who come into contact with an offender."

"NOMS has promised substantial progress with the NOMIS programme ..."

"The original concept was ambitious but still technically feasible. Problems at every level, however, led to an out of control programme which eventually NOMS could no longer afford."

"Prison and probation information requirements were quite different and each of the 42 probation areas had different ways of working. End-to-end offender management was little more than a concept, and what it meant in practice and the IT needed to support it had not been worked through."

"Although the NOMS Board failed to appreciate the full seriousness of the situation, it did instigate an investigation of the project's finances, which eventually led to the facts surfacing in 2007.

"Only then did the NOMS Board report the situation to ministers, recommending that a halt should be put on the whole of the programme and that the programme should be re-scoped."

"NOMS should not have been running a programme that had so little reporting to ministers or internally within the Department."

"Problems with the NOMIS project were not brought to the attention of the Treasury
until February 2009."