Management Toolkit

Government must demand project accountability - report

Kablenet.com

Published: 23 Jul 2004 10:35 BST

The UK Government should impose a tighter regime of accountability on IT projects introducing US style legislation to ensure that departments comply with best practice, according to an influential report published on 22 July, 2004.

The report, issued by Parliament's inquiry into IT failures at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), recommends that the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) which monitors IT projects, is expanded and strengthened.

It says that the government should put the internal reviews of IT projects by the OGC into the public domain along with information such as the "cost of the contract" and "penalties for delay".

By July 2005, the OGC should have completed a review into the effects of implementing legislation similar to the US Clinger-Cohen statutory framework, which would require departments to follow sets of standards in key areas of IT project management.

The wide-ranging report was prompted by the DWP's Child Support Agency (CSA) IT failures. The report describes a litany of IT delays and defects at the agency over the past two years. It says that the "computer system is still not working satisfactorily" and is now estimated to cost £456m.

The problems are still so serious that the DWP continues to withhold between 15 and 20 percent of payments to supplier EDS, says the report.

EDS told the inquiry that it plans to have improved the IT on the CSA's defective case management system by October 2004 and expects to complete a migration of old cases onto the new system early in 2005.

The CSA is also plagued by a "defective" telephone system supplied by BT Syntegra, says the report.

The linking of the system with the casework IT has proved a problem, says the report.

"We heard that there was a particular problem with the new telephony system of queued calls being re-routed around the country to call centres that happen to become free with the inevitable consequence that callers are unlikely to contact anyone that had any previous knowledge of their case," it says

"PCS [the Public and Commercial Services union] told us that CSA's new telephony system had actually made it harder for a customer to contact the Agency and to talk to the caseworker dealing with their case."

Overall, the IT has eroded staff morale. "In one business unit, a staggering 67 percent of staff believed that the new IT had not improved CSA's customer service at all," says the report.

It raises the possibility that the IT project may be abandoned should improvements not be made. It says a "full post mortem be undertaken" into the IT systems as "soon as is reasonably possible, either after it becomes fully operational or in the wake of its cancellation".

"If the department does not comply with reasonable requests for transparency, then we will consider the case for conducting a review into DWP IT projects with conclusions and recommendations being made to Parliament and the taxpayers who provide the financial resources," it warns.