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: Administrator
on 14 Jul 2009
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.
Posted by: Administrator
on 1 May 2009
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.
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 27 Apr 2009
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 the NAO and Audit Commission are simply filed and forgotten.
In previous articles we examined a Learning Project Organisation. The first step in creating such an organisation is to put in place processes for capturing lessons learned. Many organisations may have an internal knowledge base or specific tools for knowledge capture - the important thing is that they are structured and used in a manner that creates value for the project delivery organisation.
To avoid the
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 27 Apr 2009
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 responsibilities, career moves and promotions. Indeed it is often the case that few of the team in place at project closure were involved in the project initiation. The implication is that without formal measures to acquire and promote the lessons learned during the project, the knowledge will be lost or dispersed on or before project closure.
