UK's £500m web dole queue project director replaced after JUST 4 months

I hope there is a plan b for this.

THIS was plan b

DSS?

No, you want an AB form, this is a B form.

(With prizes for anyone who gets it.)

Re: SRO not useful, but a programme director is...

The SRO is useful, really, honestly, truely.

I have rather a lot of experience of biggish public sector projects (circa £50M to £300M) over the last 10 years. Most haven't made the news as they have actually delivered more or less on time and more or less on budget. I know this is heresy, but some govt IT projects do work and deliver.

The projects that work have a good programme directory AND a good SRO. The programme director works the day to day stuff and does what a good PM does, the SRO works the politics and the organisation. Both of these roles are needed to successfully deliver. I have had good and bad SRO's and PM's, where they are both good the projects tend to do quite well. The SRO keeps the organisation on track by stopping the knee jerk reactions and holds the organisational ship steady, the Programme director knocks the stupid additional requirements dreamt up back into touch.

None of this is rocket science and there are a number of studies produced by govt that shows the value of a good SRO and good and appropriate governance.

The problem we see (and I post anonymously as I am still on a govt project) is where SRO's chop and change. They come in, they fiddle, they leave and are replaced. These are the projects that fail or have huge issues. Where the SRO is involved and there is a good programme director, the project has a reasonable chance of success. I am lucky that my current project has a good SRO and we have a good working relationship. This makes it easier for both parties to ride out the inevitable storms that happen on all projects.

Nothing is guaranteed in any project, I've seen major private sector projects fail as well but a good SRO will make a big positive difference.

Crap

The problem is that your comment is total crap and bollocks written by somebody who hasn't the slightest ideas what he or she is talking about.

I know the project the article is referring to, its a big difficult project, that has lots of complexity. Its complicated because it tries to do a lot, its complicated as it has lots of security (do you want your personal details leaking out?), its complicated because there's lots of companies working on it as the govt splits work around. is this right or wrong, no idea, but I'd be wary of a single company trying to do everything, remember the train wreck that was the Connecting for Health debacle.

Renting space in a DC is meaningless, what fucking difference will it make renting space in a DC. Having their own full time Dev team is also meaningless, this is big, this isn't some crappy PHP project you're throwing together on Apache, you need a lot of people with a wide range of skills from infrastructure (WAN's, LAN's, OS's), security, configuration and management, development across multiple platforms, testing (and there's a lot of that), program management, finance, legal, PMO. The only people who have this range of people on tap are big Systems Integrators. No govt IT dept could afford to keep these people sat around for that once every ten years development this program is.

Talking about adapting to change quickly also shows you for the muppet you are. One of the reasons that large govt projects fail is that they try to adapt to changes at a late stage. On a project this size, you need a proper set of requirements, requirements you can trace as if you get this wrong, some people will lose their benefits and will physically suffer. Throwing in a last minute change could be a major disaster.

Big system development is hard, it's hard for the govt, its hard for the big boys, its hard for the small SME's. As you have so ably demonstrated it's actually hard for people to even understand, so that they avoid writing the rubbish you have just spouted.

a/c @10:57

never going to happen. The outsourcing route is a very nice, straightforward way to ensure no individuals can be blamed for over-runs (whether costs or time), only the large outsourcing companies - of whom there are a limited number, and an over-run on one project for one department has no consequences whatsoever for the outsource company's bids for other public sector work. Now if you take the view that "if you over-run on this project in terms of cost, you have to swallow the loss, and if you over-run on time, you aren't allowed to even bid for anything else until you finish", and couple that with publicly named individual employees in each department having contractual and financial liability for over-runs if they were predictable (and let's face it, they usually are), then maybe things might change.

The problem is John Major and his successors of all colours........

.........who outsourced Government IT in the first place. They sent the skills to the private sector and backfilled the civil service with hunderds of overpromoted policeman that were and remain IT illiterate, have no responsibility for delivery, don't accept risk, don't make decisions and expect immediate reaction to change. I'd warrant it costs more to run now in real terms numbers of people than it did when HMRC computing was privatised in 1984.

Add to that the ridiculously fragmented contracts that, in an effort to create an artificial market where there was no need for for one, split responsibility for Dev, Hosting & Support across multiple suppliers with nice big gaps in between that they then expect suppliers to cover because they can't manage their own contract properly.

There is JUST one common factor in failed Government IT. GOVERNMENT.

Re: That's your problem right there:

" moved sideways "

This happens often in a lot of organisations.

It's often cheaper to promote someone incompetent into an office with no phone, no responsibilities and no staff for the remainder of their contract than it is to sack them.