MPs: 999 HQ revamp FAIL cost £469m Failure to understand IT was one of the core reasons for what the Public Accounts Committee has called "one of the worst cases of project failure in many years". FireControl – the attempt to rationalise 45 fire service control rooms into nine regional control centres – was cancelled in December 2010 after six years and the …
C. Northcote Parkinson in "Parkinson's Law" - the part where a local government comittee needs to consider: 1. Approval of a new "Atomic power station" costing xxx million; 2. A proposed increase in the price of a cup of tea in the council canteen (or somesuch). You can probably guess which agenda item attracts the most animated debate.
NHS National program for IT - 6 billion plus in. No sniff of cancellation and failing for all the same reaons.
Fantasy specifications drawn up by clueless apparatchiks to satisfy the vanity of their political masters. Cue cynical management consultancies - contracts go to cheapest bidders - inevitably the ones with the least experience. Dishonest second tier vapourware suppliers duly signed up. Zero engagement with end users. Spin doctors promise more as the delivery dates slip.
Pockets duly lined. Responsible parties move on to bigger and better jobs. And people complain about bankers. Half a dozen fewer of these projects and there would be no deficit :-(
A broader problem: the client hopes the sly catalyst for change they find hard to announce will be 'integrated' new IT. They can't specify what they want (because they haven't done 'change' yet), so they give the specifying to the consultant too. What nobody notices is that the plebs who actually do the work now don't want change. There are layers of them entrenched, each with different resistance agendas whether justified ('these things never work') or unjustified ('bosses will see what we're doing'). Result - institutional sabotage, and an ever-escalating volume of profitable change-notes until the buck stops. Fire, health, offender management - you name it, we've all been there and done one.
I saw the real reason for major project failure in Government. Many have been listed by other posters, but these are consequential, not fundamental.
The no. 1 goal of the senior civil servants is to ensure they have a new project to work on once the current one's funding runs out. So they dream something up and then morph it into something that the politicians think is wonderful.
This is how Government Connect came about. Just as the "E-Government" funding into LG via the then-ODPM came to an end, not-at-all-coincidentally.
I'm another FiReControl survivor, and still employed in the civil service (hence the AC). I was there until late 2007 and wasn't involved in the procurement. The messages being put out at the time was that it was a business change project enabled by IT. There was also a justified fear that we weren't properly engaging with the fire service which meant that we stepped up our efforts in 2006 & 2007, which might be part of the reason for the requirements waterfall. Although I do recall that there were thousands of pages of requirements (and associated test scripts) even in 2005.
What made me leave the project was the incompetent senior manager parachuted into the project team around contract award to add capacity. All she did was remove it, and it was clear after a couple of months that she just didn't understand anything (even Dilbert's PHB would have been better).
No. In some parts of the country the fire controls use signal location to work out where you are, but most controls don't have this. It was supposed to be one of the benefits of FiReControl, so everyone had the same capability. It would have sorted out "the new Tesco" or "opposite the Frog & Firkin" as a problem since the mobile phone location (and the fixed line location) would have at least given a clue to where people were.
People not knowing where they are is a pretty common problem, especially with motoring incidents. I'm on the M6 north of Birmingham on the way to Scotland!
A clear case of moving goal posts - No project, no matter how well run or how experienced the resource facilitating the project will ever be able to provide a solution where you are changing the process at the same time. Define the process, standardise the process, ensure it works, then start to build a system around it. If it doesnt work as a manual process, its bound to fail as an IT project. At the end of the day the contractors are there to deliver to specification, no more, no less. If your specification is garbage, then you deserve everything you get. Unfortunately this means the taxpayer paying for inept systems and contracts.
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