Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog

A reader has written a trenchant response to an article on this blog about the failure of a project to manage the registration of markers of school exam papers, and the processing of marks into grades.

The reader's email is a reminder that the Office of Government Commerce's gateway review scheme was launched with the object of pre-empting high-profile IT-related disasters, particularly in central government.

It's likely the scheme has been successful in guaranteeing the success of some smaller and medium-sized projects and programmes. But there's been no cessation of major failures since the OGC began doing gateway reviews on risky IT and other projects.

A failure of the Gateway Review process?

A reader, Peter Duschinsky, writes with authority about why IT-related failures keep happening. He's responding to an article on the IT Projects blog which questioned whether Gateway Reviews are working.

"I just spotted your blog and your reader's response. I am not at all surprised at the SAT tests fiasco.

"OGC's Gateway review process doesn't deal adequately with the fundamental issue behind most of these failed or delayed projects: the high complexity of the project relative to the low capability of the organisation to manage its implementation. 

"After spending years as a change management consultant being frustrated at seeing so many modernisation and efficiency programmes failing to deliver the expected benefits, I started looking at the literature for some of the underlying causes - and found that I was not the only one to notice this problem, and it's not just in the public sector.

1) Fujitsu to withdraw from the NPfIT - what happens now? 

Summary: Only a week ago a deal aimed at rescuing the NHS's National Programme for IT in the south of England seemed imminent... But at what one NHS official said was the "59th minute of the eleventh hour" Fujitsu informed Nicholson that it was withdrawing from the negotiations...All that the NHS had been relieved to negotiate in the contract re-set has evaporated... It will be of little comfort to the Department of Health and ministers that Computer Weekly warned them in 2002 and 2003 that the NPfIT was too ambitious to be achievable, and that the programme incorporated some of the biggest mistakes of the past. For this warning ministers and some parts of the media branded us doom-mongers.
We still hope our critics will prove us wrong. But it's six years since the NPfIT was announced. How much longer do they need?

2) SAP go-live leaves 18,000 unpaid bills at Europe's largest local authority - what went wrong

[Not the shortest of headlines]

Summary: The lead for Birmingham City Council's IT-based transformation programme said of the unpaid invoices after go-live with a SAP-based financial system: "What has led to a larger backlog than we originally anticipated is a combination of all these factors. We probably anticipated every one of them but what we didn't take into account was the cumulative effect."
**
The lead for an IT transformation scheme at Europe's largest local authority, Birmingham City Council, has expressed "regret" after the troubled go-live of a SAP-based system left a backlog of more than 18,000 unpaid invoices.

On its front page today - and in a two-page spread inside - The Times has published a joint Times and Computer Weekly investigation on government IT including an opinion piece from us.

The articles refer to IT-based projects, programmes and contracts which have exceeded the original announced costs by more than £18bn.

MPs are fed up with failures of some large government IT-based projects and programmes - as are the government IT professionals, civil and public servants, and contractors who are achieving success on very limited budgets and find their work is overshadowed by the project Chimeras which have unrealistic time-frames and budgets.

The opinion and the analysis in The Times make it clear that we're not attacking government IT people but the way projects are approved without enough Parliamentary or external challenge to assumptions.

The BBC reports that "ministers have been ordered to publish two reviews into the controversial ID Cards scheme after a four-year Freedom of Information Battle".

This is true. But the BBC doesn't mention that the two "gateway reviews" in question, on the ID Cards scheme, may never be published.

The wording of the ruling by the Information Tribunal that two early gateway reviews on the ID Cards scheme should be published makes the Office of Government Commerce look foolish.

The Tribunal found, for instance, that the OGC had fielded several (very senior) witnesses, and there were passages in the written statements of more than one witness that read almost identically.

"The Tribunal noted in the course of the appeal that various passages in the statements of more than one witness read virtually identically."

Today's National Audit Office report on the C-Nomis project includes a comment from the project's replacement senior responsible owner (SRO) in 2007. "I knew we had problems when I asked for the budget and was told there wasn't one."

The NAO has written a very clear, revealing and penetrating report on C-Nomis. As the NAO says, there was a vacuum of leadership. But it is much worse than that, and the NAO report explains why.

Where was the Office of Government Commerce which argues that gateway reviews are successful in trapping flawed projects? The answer is that the OGC gave some good advice on the C-Nomis project, but because it was secret hardly anyone knew of it, and those who did ignored or sidelined it.

What is the point of the OGC if it's not taken seriously by government departments and agencies?

No wonder the OGC is such a strong advocate of Government IT secrecy. 

Links:

Report on C-Nomis - NAO website

C-Nomis prison IT system - 'basic' project management failures - Computer Weekly

This is a fuller version of a story on ComputerWeekly.com's main site.

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.

Below is my summary of two early Gateway Reviews on the ID Cards scheme which were released this week under the Freedom of Information Act.

The OGC considers the release of the reports an exception and has more than hinted that it will be unwilling to publish other reviews.

It says it will abide by a "working assumption" - in which the Ministry of Justice gives departments advice on how they can use exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act to justify a refusal to publish Gateway reviews.

Still, the OGC has saved the costs of a further appeal to the High Court by releasing the two initial "feasibility" Gateway 0 reports; and the reviews, the first one at least, shows how professional and thorough gateway reviews can be, given that they are done over only a few days.

The lesser concerns raised in the two released Gateway reviews on ID Cards were dealt with long ago. The bigger questions asked in the reviews about whether the scheme will ever be of real use, whether the security of the ID Cards database will be breached, whether the biometrics technologies are reliable enough, and whether the data will be accurate, and remain accurate, are still being asked today, and by government insiders.

The reviews also revealed that government departments which were to participate in the scheme were less enthusiastic than might have been hoped.

These are the paragraphs in the two Gateway reviews on ID Cards that I found the most interesting [the sub-headings in bold are mine]. 

Article on ComputerWeekly.com

Ian Watmore, the former Government CIO who became an adviser to the Prime Minister and then permanent secretary of DIUS, has agreed with MP Richard Bacon that gateway reviews should be published. Trouble is, Watmore has now left the civil service to become Chief Executive of the Football Association.

Will the Office of Government Commerce, which runs gateway reviews, listen to Watmore? It says no. [Does it listen to anyone who advocates more openness?] 

More Ian Watmores in government please.  

Full story

Key points in the 31 Gateway Reviews released on the NPfIT last week are:

i)  the professionalism and independence of the Gateway reviewers who have been able to take the "big view" while those working on the programme have been confined to small components only.

There seems a bit of a panic in Whitehall over media coverage of the release of Gateway Reviews on the NHS IT scheme.

  This is an editorial we have published in the print edition of Computer Weekly  

[Picture DIUSGOVUK] 

Computer Weekly is not prone to panegyric, but here we make an exception.

Ian Watmore is like a cool breeze entering a hot, stuffy room. He reached the top of his profession in the private sector, as UK managing director of international services company Accenture; he made it to the top slot for any IT expert in Government as chief CIO.

And he went further, becoming head of the No. 10 Delivery Unit and adviser to two prime ministers. It's a pity that on 1 June he left the civil service. He has taken his reforming zeal to the Football Association, as its chief executive.

The traits that mark Watmore out include his plain speaking and his lack of fear when taking sensible risks. More than that, he's open about past mistakes, analyses them, and tries to apply what he has learnt from them

This article on Computer Weekly's homepage reports on a decision of the Office of Government Commerce to publish the recommendations and RAG - red, amber, green - statuses of 23 Government high-risk IT projects and programmes, three years after I'd requested them.

This is the OGC's full FOI response: ogcresponse.pdf

Computer Weekly article

"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."