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 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.
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 20 Apr 2009
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 certain about the handover state of the project that you are responsible for On-Boarding? Equally how can you set the terms of the transfer without clear view the projects current situation in relation to success or failure?
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
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 24 Mar 2009
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 details visible to the estimated 400,000 ContactPoint users, only the name, sex and age of a shielded child should be visible. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has apparently admitted that there are problems in the system for shielding details of an estimated 55,000 vulnerable children and it has ordered a pause in the data upload by local authorities while the problem is investigated.
Posted by: OneOne Hundred
on 12 Mar 2009
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.
