NPfIT failed nine Gateway Reviews Nearly one third of the National Programme for IT's Gateway Reviews until 2007 produced a red status demand for immediate remedial action. Of 31 reviews produced by the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce and released under the Freedom of Information Act on 18 June 2009, nine had a red status, meaning "To achieve success …
"Despite the good progress on procurement, the current lack of engagement with the hearts and minds of the staff within the NHS at all levels, the lack of a coherent benefits realisation strategy and the absence of clarity regarding the organisational structure that will address these problems means that the overall status of the National Programme is red."
So they'd managed to spend lots of money, but the customer thinks it's a waste of time, the project management haven't actually got anything to contradict that view, and they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. It's pretty obvious why the status is red, but what's that word "Despite" doing at the front. Surely the fact that they'd spent all this cash *before* having a clue is just one more reason why the project management should be taken out to the pay-and-display patients' carpark and probed with Victorian surgical instruments.
It sounds to me like even the review body are a twunch of bats.
"The Department of Health's Director General for Informatics has recently made clear that if significant progress is not achieved by the end of November 2009, a new approach may need to be adopted,"
And this new approach may well turn out to be the funniest thing ever written in the history of Project management when set against how much effort and expense has already been wasted on this total fuck up of an initiative.
As Churchill might have put it... "never has so little been achieved, by so many, at such expense."
Statitically, one third of all IT projects basically succeed, one third delivery but with compromises in scope, costs, or timing, and one third fail outright to meet functionality, timing, or cost by large margins.
So saying one third of the projects were graded "red" would be spot on average, and anyone with a smidgeon of project management experience would know this.
Nothing to see here, move on...
Green means "pass", yellow means "marginal", and red means "failure". What's needed now is a black indicator for "crash". "Crash" means "The project has failed to meet its goals, and no amount of corrective action can be made to correct this failure. The project should be terminated with all speed to conserve limited resources."
Once the excuse was shown to be an excuse anything else could come out.
29% fail and counting.
Just hypothetically what *might* have happened if people who knew what they were talking about had seen those reviews and actually done something about it?
A good day for FOI. A bad day for taxpayers money.
And the Mastering the Internet proejct @ GCHQ looks to be bigger and *much* more secret.
Darkenss is the absence of the light. Darkness is where evil breeds.
NPfIT is not presented as a multitude of programmes of which some might be expected to wither and die,and some succeed. @above. It is presented as The National Programme for IT (or was until it lost its top, changed its name, and commenced a recognisable process)
The many entities on and around healthcare are more like nodes on the Internet than a rigidly controllable well-understood structured corporation, and the laissez-faire development with attention to linkage of the 'Net is a better model than the "ruthless" approach of that chap who was going on to do a couple more of the years he so much enjoyed, until his mind changed.
"Statitically, one third of all IT projects basically succeed, one third delivery but with compromises in scope, costs, or timing, and one third fail outright to meet functionality, timing, or cost by large margins"
A very fair point.
The project is only *averagely* bad for IT projects.
I find that a great comfort to me as I contemplate the £12.7 billion of *our* money it has consumed over the last decade or so. Roughly £4.2 bn is solid, another £4.2bn is sort of OK and £4.2 bn is a complete waste.
Perhaps the sheer size of it might have suggested a slightly *better* than average approach would have been a cost effective idea.
And the only known figure for the highly secret IMP was £12bn from the start.
Thank you for the perspective.
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