Public Sector IT Failures

Computer Weekly published a very interesting article this week: “PAC reveals its exasperation at endless public IT failures.” There is a copy here.

The reasons for failure are invariably the same every time, typical candidates being “good news cultures” where it is politically impossible to steer a project effectively until it’s too late, being taken to the cleaners by the top tier implementers, a lack of will to drive a change project properly and incapable, incompetent staff.

Generally the real reason is the way in which skills are recruited to do the work. Take the NHS for example, by no stretch of the imagination can it be considered to be highly innovative, capable of transforming itself or an exemplar of leading change. Yet every advert for staff looks like the real example below:

“CANDIDATES CAN ONLY BE CONSIDERED FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY IF THEY HAVE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITHIN THE NHS. My client based in the south east is looking for an Interim Project Lead, working around the employment of people who use the trusts services...”

The process of engaging high quality staff to lead significant change is hamstrung by a staff procurement policy that limits the pool of available talent.

A similar problem exists within most other public government projects. As the PAC points out, the greater proportion of IT projects either overrun or fail abysmally due to poor project and programme management. Yet, all adverts for project managers insist on Prince 2 or MSP qualifications. As these tools are clearly not working, why is there such an insistence on them being used? The only organisations that appear to be benefiting from the application of these tools are the training companies and the OGC subgroup that sets the standard.

The Catalyst supplier catalogue as another area that limits the success of government projects. In an attempt to limit the number of suppliers the procurement groups need to deal with the public sector has narrowed its choice down to a small number of companies that again, insist on track records of working on projects within the public sector and qualifications that clearly don’t work. Not surprisingly the same company names crop up again and again, every time there is a failure.

Any privately owned consultancy or systems implementer has a strategic goal to extract as much money from its customers as possible. This is diametrically opposed to the way in which the public sector engages these services; by abdicating as much responsibility as possible and relying on the procurement frameworks and project management “standards” to ensure that they achieve the desired outcomes. Based on the number of project failures, neither the frameworks nor the standards are fit for purpose in establishing effective ways of engaging skills and delivering results.

Security clearance is another area that limits the ability of government to engage skills. Security clearance is demanded up front by most companies supplying skills to government. The net effect is that to be able to work in government you have to have worked in government in the past.

The upshot of all this is that the pool of skills that contributed to the previous project failures are recruited once again because they have the inappropriate qualification and the security clearance to be able to cock up another project and waste more tax-payers money.

All that said, the public sector isn’t a talent wasteland. Neither are all consultancies rotten to the core. Somewhere along the line, the objectives of the public sector have been waylaid and the current mess is the result. This was brought home to me in a conversation I had over lunch recently, where a lady responsible for recruiting top talent told me that her prime driver was to remove all middle aged white men from her organisation. As I said, somewhere, someone has lost the plot.