Viewing 15 posts - 41 through 55 (of 55 total)
  • Has there ever been a successful government IT project?
  • MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    To be fair, I was once handed the poisoned chalice of implementing a private sector IT project after the two previous managers had walked away.

    My first task was to point out that we could have had a bespoke solution to the real problem for about £4 million, rather than spend twice that bodging over our old system with a pretty front end. Apparently the contract was non refundable though.

    I delivered it one day late, as no way was I launching it on April 1st.

    I have never project managed anything else since mind. No way!

    mudshark
    Free Member

    New DWP Oracle project in Warrington is looking for contractors, I’ve chosen not to be put forward as they won’t pay me a suitable rate. Wondering how that will go as they need a lot of bodies.

    olddog
    Full Member

    … sifting through this – the solution would seem to be:

    – Employ top quality private sector procurement and commercial people, paying competitive salaries
    – Not necessarily take the lowest price
    – Stop Government changing policy which has an impact of project spec part way through projects

    Good luck with that – I’m sure the press would have a field day on the first two

    There is another problem and that is with a fundamental culture clash between public and private sector and what the aims and motivations of both are. Over simplifying – public sector is to deliver public services to standard and budget set by Govt. Private sector to deliver a return to shareholders. The first should be inherently collaborative and the second inherently competitively. The naivety of the public sector in commercial dealings can mean they are led by the nose by the private contractors. Why should IBM care that money is being diverted from front line law enforcement, education or health as long as their profits are maintained, but public sector doesn’t understand that? Clearly the private sector needs to ensure that they don’t cause reputational damage that would damage long term profitability, but ultimately their role is maximise profits not to hold-hands with the public sector.

    DT78
    Free Member

    I see reference to ‘bespoke’ up there. It’s one thing that perplexes me a little as it now appears to be seen as a ‘dirty word’ when it comes to projects.

    Almost as if architects / pms / suppliers and customers are on some level of commission to try to deliver the most expensive solution possible using ‘best of breed’ / Gartner magic quadrant stuff when, if you actually sat down with the customer and a small dedicated team of shit hot developers they could build you a solution that would meet all the customers needs, quicker, whilst taking a zero off the original estimates. (this is a true story, the system is now coming up 5 years old, zero downtime, zero defects, delivered ahead of schedule, under budget)

    I think the rot began when senior bods thought that getting rid of the majority of skilled IT workers from the uk industry (not just the civil service) was a good idea. Amazing the number of companies you talk to now who are doing trainee or apprenticeship schemes to try to repair the damage. I kind of look at GDS and wonder if that is the begin of the civil service attempting to reintroduce IT skills to its perm workforce. Going to be a long road to recovery.

    DT78
    Free Member

    Actually I have one solid bit of advice I picked up from someone in my travels.

    They talked of a company that was consistently failing with its deliverables. To turn this around they made a policy that any initiative HAD to be deliverable inside 6 months. If it was to take longer than 6 months it needed to be broken down into smaller chunks. Proper incremental/iterative thinking to delivery is the only way to keep up with moving goal posts. That’s why Agile is flavour of the moment, it is supposed to (if done well) help with that.

    woody74
    Full Member

    It projects in banks are often similar with failure and massive overspend. Both banks and government have huge amounts of money to spend and fall back on and personally I think it is due to both having higher management/politicians that don’t want to know the nitty gritty and want to palm off responsibility to some external so called expert company. The management/politicians can never then be blamed as they can always state “Well we did hire professionals” It is the same with auditors, how many of the big firms totally screwed up on the financial crisis but are still in business and being used. It because higher management want someone else to take the blame.

    With IT projects often politicians don’t understand that it is the IT systems that actually provides the service, not some promise they make. They think the computer system is just some easy admin service like air conditioning and forget that it is the key component in offering and running a department or service.

    Personally I think there is no excuse now for so many failed IT projects in government as so many have happened that the civil service should have sorted itself out and have better ways of doing things. Its not like the systems they are developing are cutting edge. Some like the NHS are very complicated but thats because they are so behind with the times and are going from nothing to trying to sprint with no other systems in between. They really need a 10 to 20 yr plan on how to bring the NHS upto the IT standards of big business and just admit that it will take and long time and money and that they need to do it in increments. Thats how every other business has done it. You can’t go from nothing to sprinting in one go. Just look at Apple with its maps, bloody awful and still no where near as detailed or as good as Google. Even the might of Apple have learned you have to do it in increments and slowly.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    We need an IT dept in the Civil Service. Bring the skills and expertise in-house. It doesn’t need every resource, but certainly a core.

    hot_fiat
    Full Member

    We need an IT dept in the Civil Service. Bring the skills and expertise in-house. It doesn’t need every resource, but certainly a core.

    Supposedly that’s what the NHS BSA and NPfIT were set up to do. BSA ended up being outsourced to Crapita and NPfIT, well, they were an utter gob-smacking disaster area that imploded in on themselves. The most useless bunch of half-wits I’ve ever encountered (for the technical: they virtualized EVERYTHING onto 1 ESX box).

    brassneck
    Full Member

    If the aim of N3 was to prevent progress in digital healthcare, job done 🙂

    brassneck
    Full Member

    (for the technical: they virtualized EVERYTHING onto 1 ESX box).

    I do hope they used SATA DAS, and set the reservations so that when it did al fall over only 1 VM could restart.

    Proper job, like.

    gwaelod
    Free Member

    Met Office built an entirely new HQ in a different part of the country.
    Fitted it out with a mahoosive new computer, migrated it’s IT systems from old place to new place without missing a beat and no downtime. On time, in budget, completely smooth switchover.

    It didn’t make the news though.

    dragon
    Free Member

    Yes but the Met Office know what they want from a computer system having been using one since the late 50’s. They have highly skilled people who understand their models and the best hardware on which to run them, IT projects in other government areas are nothing like that at all. Same as I bet GCHQ don’t have crappy IT project failures either.

    jamj1974
    Full Member

    I bet GCHQ don’t have crappy IT project failures either.

    Really? I bet they have.

    poly
    Free Member

    Has there ever been a successful government IT project?

    Depending on how you define success you could remove the word government from the question.

    The reality is most IT projects are initiatives either driven by techies trying to impose their order on things with no understanding of customer needs or are poorly defined customer requirements which the customer expects IT will miraculously solve when in reality the problem is nothing to do with IT systems but say people, or management or processes, or politics…

    jamj1974
    Full Member

    The reality is most IT projects are initiatives either driven by techies trying to impose their order on things with no understanding of customer needs or are poorly defined customer requirements which the customer expects IT will miraculously solve when in reality the problem is nothing to do with IT systems but say people, or management or processes, or politics…

    And here is IME the nub of the matter…

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