Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 21 Oct 2009
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.
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Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 24 Apr 2009
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 methodologies.
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 21 Apr 2009
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 as saying: "The Ministry of Defence and the Welsh Authorities failed to collaborate sufficiently throughout the project. Although for much of the time both had complementary objectives, they did not establish a common purpose for the project or a common understanding of their respective assumptions about the future of the site. The Red Dragon project highlights the danger in large and complex projects that involve multiple public bodies of insufficient openness and information sharing."
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 30 Mar 2009
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 such mistakes were allowed to be made by those charged with oversight of the JPA programme.'
The
