Single Farm Payments - Lessons Learnt by RPA?

OneOne Hundred — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:40:54 +0100

The National Audit Office (NAO) has slammed DEFRA, its Rural Payments Agency and the EU farm subsidies system in England. Edward Leigh, the head of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, described the situation at Defra as a "masterclass of misadministration".

The NAO report condemns the costs to taxpayers and attributes the fiasco to the Agency’s £350m IT Systems, in use for only four years.

But why were Ministers given misleading progress reports, green lights? The reportRead More...

Can project failure be cured by small - non-complex projects? Are we entering an era of ...

Administrator — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:32:38 +0100

Earlier this year the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, suggested that if the Conservative Party were to form the next Government they will put a cap on project size of £100m.

In a recent paper from the Centre for Policy Studies- ‘it’s ours’, author - Liam Maxwell, recommends a move away from centralisation under Transformational Government to more distributed data, substantially reducing or removing the need for monolithic government systems holding an indRead More...

A Call for Action - Review all Projects during first One Hundred Days

Administrator — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The recent Budget suggests that the government will be cancelling major projects for the foreseeable future. Is this the right approach? Well only if the original purpose and business benefits of the project are no longer required. We don't go into major projects quickly or lightly they need an established business case and a great deal of money has been spent on them prior to the contract award.

Creating the learning project organisation - using lessons learned

OneOne Hundred — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

An article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) entitled "Don’t Just Capture Knowledge - Put it to Work" begins

“What’s the point of capturing organisational knowledge if it’s going to be tossed in some file and forgotten? That’s all too often what happens to lessons from post-mortems and after action reviews.”

Given the research which indicates some 70% of the projects are regarded as failures, this suggests that the lessons analysis undertaken by organisations like thRead More...

Creating the learning project organisation - first steps

OneOne Hundred — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Essentially a project is a temporary organisation with staff drawn from different organisations, departments and skill bases to undertake an ad-hoc task. When that task is finished without a process in place to manage it, the knowledge and experience accrued by the project team disperses with team members on project closure. During the project lifecycle, further dispersion of the knowledge occurs through the churn of personnel arising from changes in resource need, changes in responsibilitiesRead More...

Why Don't we Learn from Project failure?

OneOne Hundred — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Why we are not learning from Project Failures

With approximately 70% of all IT-enabled projects considered to be failures, a question that is regularly asked is "Why do projects fail?" There have been extensive studies on this subject, but perhaps a more pertinent question should be "How do we learn from project failure?" A good starting point for such learning would be to consider the lessons learnt from individual projects and to build this leaning into improvements in our project methodologRead More...

Red Dragon - a lesson in failed project collaboration?

OneOne Hundred — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Red Dragon - a project by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), Welsh Assembly Government and the then Welsh Development Agency (the Welsh Authorities) to provide modern aviation repair facilities at St Athan, South Wales - has cost the taxpayer around £113 million, although it was meant to have saved MOD money and protected jobs in the area, according to a joint report released today by the National Audit Office and the Wales Audit Office. Jeremy Colman, Auditor General for Wales, is quoted aRead More...

Project On-boarding - mitigating risk from personnel and organisational changes

OneOne Hundred — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Are you taking on an existing project from either inside or outside of your organisation?

Increasingly, Mergers, Takeovers, Outsourcing, personnel changes and Shared Services means that during the project lifecycle delivery responsibility passes to different reporting lines.

‘On-Boarding' has become a core project management capability.
Most projects expect to make some change to the delivery during the project life-cycle but how can you be certaRead More...

Soldiers in £250m MoD pay shambles

OneOne Hundred — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The headlines in the Metro newspaper this morning were “Soldiers in £250m MoD pay shambles”. The article highlights the problems affecting 10% of service personnel (nearly 20,000 people) following the introduction of a £245 million Armed Forces payroll system. The article quotes from a recently published Defence Select Committee report - 'It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the failure of the joint personnel administration (JPA)' and 'It is, in our view, truly reprehensible that suRead More...

What constitutes project success?

OneOne Hundred — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

What is success?
If you have been on a project management training course you might say Cost, Time and Quality those aspects might be easily measured in a traditional infrastructure project of which there are numerous examples but in the complex multi-stakeholder environment of today's technology projects it really is just a part of the story.

Technology and business developments have broadened the nature of projects to the extent that there is now a continuum from purely technicaRead More...

Project failure is not just about money!

OneOne Hundred — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A report in the The Times today reveals that security flaws have halted work on ContactPoint, the database designed to hold the details of all 11 million children and teenagers in England. The database is supposed to have a shielding mechanism in place, which prevents unauthorised users from seeing details on victims of domestic violence, children in witness protection programmes, etc. Whilst most children will have their names, addresses, dates of birth, and school, GP and social services deRead More...

Recession is Perfect Time for Project Management

OneOne Hundred — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

An article in the CIO Magazine suggests that "Cutting operation inefficiencies in these tough economic times is the perfect reason for IT decision makers making the pitch for investment in enterprise project management tools." Whilst we would agree that improving project management is essential in the current economic climate, simply spending money on ERP and EPM projects is unlikely to deliver the required success, particularly as approximately 70% of projects are regarded as failures.

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