IT projects lack skills and experience

Thursday, September 10, 2009

A report has found that major IT projects have suffered problems because the government has not shared skills and experience enough.

The Public Accounts Committee's report has looked at learning and innovation in government and found that while it is something that should be welcomed, there needs to be better checks on its progress.

"Innovation involves trying new things, some of which ultimately will not work. So experimentation is necessary, but with public money at stake, government needs to be able to halt ineffective activities quickly and learn lessons from them," the report said.

"Projects examined by the committee have suffered from a lack of available project management skills and a failure to nurture those they do have, such as in the C-NOMIS and Bowman projects."

It said the C-NOMIS project was hampered by a consistent shortage of skilled personnel and hence an over-reliance on contracted-in staff. The failure to put in place the right project management skills also affected the delivery of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and the Bowman communications system, the report said.

"It is a positive sign that more expertise is being brought into government, but internal expertise needs to be built up too. Things go wrong where unsuitably skilled staff are brought in to run a contractual relationship, or where they abdicate responsibility to private sector contractors," it said.

"There is no substitute for building up the learning and experience of in-house managers so that they can manage projects and the risks associated with them, and get the best from external contractors."

The report acknowledged that the Office of Government Commerce's (OGC) Gateway Reviews are one way of capturing lessons for others to learn. But it added that projects subject to the reviews still suffer problems.

Government has also paid insufficient attention to analysing the lessons from the reviews, the report said. A lack of good management information is still a hindrance in some cases, and inhibits understanding the impact of innovation, it added.

Edward Leigh, PAC chairman, said: "In its scrutiny of how departments deliver public services, this committee has seen many examples of departments repeating mistakes that they or other parts of government have made in the past. This failure to learn from experience is particularly serious in the current economic climate when the need to find more efficient and effective ways of delivering services with fewer resources is becoming ever more acute."

Leigh added that the committee has drawn up a list of principles which it considers "fundamental to learning and innovation".

Principles for success set out by the committee included setting an innovative tone from the top; openness about performance; pro-active sharing of information; collaborating with suppliers - rather than simply contracting them; and welcoming peer review as an opportunity rather than a threat.

"Departments should reflect upon the extent to which these principles underpin their own culture and practices," Leigh said.