[Closed] Has there ever been a successful government IT project?

what on earth is it with government IT projects? Why do they always end up as such monumental cluster-****s?

Never been directly involved in one but I'd suggest a number of factors:

1) contract given to the lowest bidder
2) budget largely seen as a bottomless pit of money by contractors
3) ever changing requirements and design controlled by committee
4) changes in government over the lifetime of the project with successors keen to discredit predecessors work
5) oversight by people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing

and of course

6) designing and implementing bespoke IT systems to handle these things is actually a fair bit harder than it sounds.

Lack of well trained and paid internal staff. Means high usage of contractors and suppliers whose primary purpose is to make as much money as possible and maybe deliver. At some point.
I have witnessed multi million £ programmes largely staffed by contractors reporting to contractors. Does not make a healthy mix.

There have been plenty of successful projects though. They just dont make the papers.

There'll be loads, you just never get to hear of successes.

But, tbh:

Budget - what we think it may cost or what something wants to pay

Timescale - when we think we can do it for or when someone wants it

Quality - See Bontragers 1st Rule 🙂

IME (30 years of IT including +10 years of IT Audit) most projects (and not just IT) are doomed to not meet expectations in one way or another from the very start; due to unrealistic expectations on budget, timescales and quality.

Govt projects also suffer because they are mostly driven by a Politicians having an 'idea', rather than thinking about the problem/solution, that they want in now. Also the dept is usually still struggling to complete the previous 'idea'.

Same stuff as usual. From [url= http://www.information-age.com/it-management/finance-and-project-management/news/2112748/optimism-bias-put-ukba-it-system-28m-over-budget ]this link[/url]...

"Loss of focus, poor governance and a tendency towards optimism bias in planning, delivery and reporting have contributed to the problems," the report said.

It said the programme board overseeing delivery "did not challenge IT contractors about their use of resources, necessary because the contract was on a 'time and materials basis". In 2008, the UK Border Agency awarded the system integration contract for the programme to IBM.

An absence of rigourous financial oversight "was compounded by optimistic reporting on the status of the programme's financial position", it added.

in my experiance it is two key factors:
1) 'big bang' delivery rather than itterating small phases
2) complexity of requirements

(ie they would like the system to do absolutly everything it could possibly ever do, from day one)

I think the whole procurement process is also pretty dysfunctional

There have been plenty of successful projects though. They just dont make the papers.

this.

the govt will be doing many, many more IT projects that you'd ever hear about in the media - most people probably wouldn't give a shit about 99% of them.

There have been plenty of successful projects though. They just dont make the papers.

There are also far too many projects in the private sector that go the same way as that one that you don't get to hear about.

In my small experience, changing of the goal posts, because the contract was to build some vague IT concept and the reality is clueless people failing to agree, such that it needs to be both an apple, pear and orange all at the same time.

Ultimately though it has to be due to poor leadership and project control, combined with the sense that there is no penalty for failure. The mandrins still get their gold plated pension and the contractor gets their Porsche, so everyone's happy, they are all in the money and the only loser is the tax payer (and who cares about them).

bring back internal IT departments , make it a really lucrative job and paid well, so anyone who slacks can easily be replaced - then the projects will all be internal and have some sense of control and priority and can change requirements/delay/postpone without incurring massive penalty fee's that an external contract would cost

I've been involved in a few. My only offering is the successful ones were where they used smaller firms who had more to lose and they also invested upfront in proper planning.

[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer ]This one was pretty successful.[/url]

Unfortunately they sort of took a step backwards when they "decommissioned" it shortly afterwards.

Big projects are hard. Scale brings its own challenges.

but...

Requirements uncertainty or drift kill most projects. An example of how not to do it was the Poll Tax. Requirements were basically the bill. The go live date was fixed, so development had to start before the bill had been through committee. Committee stage changed the requirements but not the date. Second reading changed it again, but not the date. Even then, the bill was not clear and consistent. Projects had to go in on the date even though testing wasn't complete and there were loads of known bugs. And then it was scrapped.

Politicians......
Bolted.......
Door........
Stapled.....

In some kind of order......

Yes, I deal with successful government IT projects all the time.

And with that, I'm out before anyone starts joining dots 😉

Seems to me the unsuccessful ones are nearly always the ones where some large external contractor like CSC, Capita, Serco etc are involved. In a previous job I had to work with Capita on implementing online council services and it was a complete nightmare. They kept changing personnel on the job so we had different consultants coming in doing the same job as their predecessors but changing everything all the time, then they'd be moved onto another project (or they left) and the whole process would start again with someone else. This went on for about two years with no progress.

[url= http://www.nao.org.uk/report/the-failure-of-the-firecontrol-project/ ]http://www.nao.org.uk/report/the-failure-of-the-firecontrol-project/[/url]

£469 million wasted. No one appears to be held accountable.

Can we do Universal credit next?

That is even worse

If it rolls out at its current rate it will be a mere two thousand years till everyone is on it ....go IDS go go go

[i]Evidence of waste and poor management within Britain’s immigration system has been laid bare by a parliamentary report which reveals that failed IT systems are to cost up to £1bn while officials cannot find 50,000 rejected asylum seekers.[/i]

I find this paragraph very vague. It doesn't really say much and I don't see a strong argument on why the IT systems are classed as failures. It doesn't say anything very much but seems to fan the flames without saying what's at the bottom of it. Reading the article past this link didn't really help.

Plenty work fine, the ones that don't make the headlines, for many of the reasons above.

And a lot of government departments rely on old legacy systems. Spend as much as you like but a well polished early 90s turf is still a turf.

Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting the roll out of Windows 7 on our desktops. See what that does to our bespoke systems when they run on it.....

And can I add, the longer it takes to roll out universal credit, the longer I have a job. We used to be a labour intensive agency that cost £50 million a year. Changing legislation, removing the need for three quarters of our staff has seen fraud in our corner of the system jump by about £500 million year.

A fact that a colleague explained in words of one syllable to some clueless bigwig from DWP the other day when they asked if we could help them reduce the fraud cost.

There are loads of successful ones - every time you open a government website you're looking at one, even if you don't use the more advanced functionality.

Lots of reasons above that tally with my experience of projects delivering to government or other customers. For me these are the prime issues: -
1). Unrealistic timescales - more about customer demand than result of proper estimation and planning. Also failure to properly review future stages as a result of earlier stages outputs or lessons
2). Requirements changing and linked to further of the above
3). Costs regularly developed to meet the expectation of customer not the true cost of delivery
4). No real cost or time tolerance agreed to a manage issues
5). Failure to effectively prioritise projects, issue resolution, etc...
6). Vanity. In the choice of project. In the selection of requirements. In timescale and in cost. In failing to raise and escalate issues...

There are loads of successful ones

This too.

Junkyard politicians of all parties agreed Universal credit was a good idea

@Graham had it pretty much nailed in the first reply.

One reason cost over-runs are so high is that companies bid low on initial quote as they know spec/scope of the project will change so they can rack up additional costs. Then of course we have the issue that a lot of money is spent with no working system to show for it.

On scale issues and IT I worked for a very high profile US Bank (initially in technology) which had a policy of allowing each division (they where 5) to have it's own IT. I initially thought this was daft with duplication etc but it meant each division got the system it wanted, so costs where duplicated but at least everything worked. The British government should take note of this and as posted above keep projects at a scale which makes sense.

On the flipside I was reading an article in the BMJ recently about encouraging doctors to learn how to code so that they could produce their own systems.

Which seems like a [i]spectacularly[/i] bad idea.

Edit: here we go, [url= http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f5142 ]"Turning doctors into coders", [i]BMJ 2013;347:f5142 (Published 20 August 2013)[/i][/url] - you'll need a BMJ sub to read it all.

@binners to draw a parallel with another thread here if a local authority cannot repair a bridleway what chance managing a large complex IT project. Wasting £70k on a few 100 yards of Bridleway vandalsim and you can see where a £1 billion goes on IT

@GrahamS that's priceless, you can't make this stuff up !

Never been directly involved in one but I'd suggest a number of factors:

1) contract given to the lowest bidder
2) budget largely seen as a bottomless pit of money by contractors
3) ever changing requirements and design controlled by committee
4) changes in government over the lifetime of the project with successors keen to discredit predecessors work
5) oversight by people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing

and of course

6) designing and implementing bespoke IT systems to handle these things is actually a fair bit harder than it sounds.

4.5 continuous and extensive changes in project budget and stake holders and staff over the lifetime of the project and the urgent need of these people to stamp their authority on the project ensuring lots and lots of unecessary changes

From the supplier's point of view:

1. Customer watches too much CSI and so has unrealistic expectations of what's achievable.
2. Customer fails to employ anyone with technical or business acumen (you never meet anyone who used to work high up at somewhere like coca-cola, IBM or BP).
3. Customer's lawyers couldn't negotiate their way into a shop to buy a paper bag.
4. Customer constantly changes goal posts - imagine buying a brand new car where at every stage in the build process you change your mind about what you need - you'd end up with James May's ALFAAB crossed with a dumper truck.
5. Customer really doesn't have any money so the rock bottom price the outsourcer agrees to, in the hope of back-filling with exuberant change request charges will always fail to make them any money. Outsourcer then supplies lowest level/quality of staffing to try and eek out a tiny margin.
6. Customer used to manage the whole thing, is generally peeved at having to hand their empire to some French or American spods.
7. Tu-peed staff are generally peeved off at losing whole string of civil service benefits, working 09:00:01 to 16:59:59 Monday to Friday with an hour for lunch, free tea, coffee & the most amazing chocolate brownies and being able to retire at 55.
8. Nobody in customer willing to take decisions without input from [s]Politburo[/s] internal business process committee.
9. For some reason they never outsource [s]IT Security[/s] business impediment department so everything that we try and implement gets thrown back.

All of the above in my limited experience.

The same can also be said about lots of private sector IT projects, especially when they get very large. These giamungous projects are just so big and so complex, that it's very difficult to get them running smoothly, irrespective of how much cash gets chucked at them.

When you then factor in the ever changing requirements, limited budget, extended timescales etc etc, it's a surprise that anything ever gets anywhere near completed.

who used to work high up at somewhere like coca-cola, IBM or BP

This is no guarantee of competence, but you will employ a psychopath.

I've been involved in loads of good ones; GLOW, N3, Pathfinder, etc, etc.

IMHO the problem starts with the specification: gov departments are generally useless at actually giving you the spec that you need to deliver the thing successfully in the first place.

If you haven't a workable spec, or the spec keeps changing, you're onto plums.

There's been a trend recently for govt contracts to try and get around this, by essentially asking the contractor to indemnify the gov against this- depending on how hungry the con is, this might or might not happen. Where I work, they're saying no to a lot of these deals now as they're too risky.

When you then factor in the ever changing requirements, limited budget, extended timescales

@hot_fiat the government doesn't pay enough to hire low level people from IBM, BP, Coca-Cola etc never mind anyone senior

@cody - what did those systems do, why where they successful ?

GP IT has been pretty successful for most users, way better than hospitals, and most of us have been paperless for years.

This is because we are "user-choosers" and are given some latititude to configure and adapt our systems. The problems all tend to be around the way bizarre government initiaives and imperatives are implemented in a top-down manner. Or where some muppet in community services decides to get Commnutiy nurses using the one system which won't talk to any one else.. 😥

Problem one: finding anyone at government department who actually knows their own rules and understands their correct implementation, rather than what they think it ought to mean, or just making it up as they go along.

Problem two: getting them explained to person writing software.

Problem three: finding out that between one and two above, the rule has changed, the department is now interpreting the same rule differently for political reasons, or a tribunal/court has realised the rule was complete gobbledegook to start with and forced them to apply it differently.

the government doesn't pay enough to hire low level people from IBM, BP, Coca-Cola etc never mind anyone senior

I still remember the casual remark made by a senior representative of the customer two weeks before go-live - "You've built us an oil tanker,but now we need a speed boat so we can change quickly". This comment was made over 2 years and £40m+ after they turned down our proposal to build them a bespoke solution using an agile approach for less than £10m in favour of a famously inflexible well known behemoth product that we had to implement instead.

ninfan - Member
Problem one: finding anyone at government department who actually knows their own rules and understands their correct implementation, rather than what they think it ought to mean, or just making it up as they go along.
Problem two: getting them explained to person writing software.
Problem three: finding out that between one and two above, the rule has changed, the department is now interpreting the same rule differently for political reasons, or a tribunal/court has realised the rule was complete gobbledegook to start with and forced them to apply it differently.

So true!

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!

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(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.

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.

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.

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

Really? I bet they have.

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...

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...