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Gordon Brown must simplify tax, clarify employment status and turn his back on traditional methods of IT project management, such as Prince2. The list of demands to Britain’s prime minister, which reads like a contractor’s wishlist, has been issued by three separate groups, all pushing for Labour to change tack. Because it poses one of the biggest challenges to Mr Brown and his team, the management of IT projects in the public sector should be looked at first, say analysts at Butler. No longer should multi-agency projects in the sector be led by big-bang deployment, which has so far resulted in IT projects ‘haemorrhaging money’ and failing to deliver, Butler said. Instead, the analyst proposed, pilot projects to test concepts on a small manageable scale that are extended only when the business case is proven should be implemented. Although this approach, dubbed Proof-Win, would be slower than others, it is far more likely to succeed and will be less expensive in the long run, argued Butler’s Sarah Burnett. She said: “Put simply, there are three main principles to Proof-Win: user requirement management, full functionality trials that are repeated to take into account issues that arise out of extending the project, and measurement of outcomes.” To manage user requirement, IT personnel must sit in the departments that are going to be affected by the change, to shadow users, and observe and learn the daily processes of the department. They must measure “throughput and efficiency” before the deployment to compare with measurements after. Having consulted the users and learnt their daily routines, the IT staff can then define the user specifications, and have them checked and agreed by the users. For the second phase, Burnett explained: “The full functionality trial is about delivering the complete IT functionality that is required, no matter how small the scale of the exercise. “This means neither cutting corners, nor making do with inferior functionality to what would be deployed in the extended roll out otherwise the proof of concept will be unrepresentative of the wider solution. Scaling up is done by degrees with new issues and lessons learnt included in the proof of concept at the next stage.” The development phase should see mock-ups, screenshots, and simulations regularly displayed of the final solution, not least to show users that the project remains on track. “When the trial is successfully deployed, it must run for at least one year to allow time to resolve teething problems, and for the new system to get into a steady state of operation,” Burnett said. “This period must be used to prove resilience, flexibility and scalability. IT staff must then return to work with users to get their feedback, observe and note the effects of change on service delivery and productivity, and compare measures of throughput and efficiency. Unexpected results and lessons learnt must be fed into the next stage.” According to the analyst, only when success is proven, should attempts be made to extend the project to other organisations. By then, stakeholders would be on-board thanks to a compelling business case, which would also serve to support the extended rollout, and win over even the biggest sceptics. Burnett, who has over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry, said Proof Win could also help the private sector – particularly a conglomerate where staff involved on a project report to different managers in different subsidiaries. But the layout of the public sector is immediately suited to the technique: “Being organised in a complex way, the public sector has a culture that does not lend itself to centralised IT project specification and governance. “Delivering multi-agency projects, where there are no direct lines of reporting within the organisation of the project, cannot follow traditional project management routes,” Burnett said. The analyst’s appeal to Gordon Brown coincides with an open letter sent to the new prime minister calling for the tax system to be simplified. Experts at the Chartered Institute of Taxation said new measures to make the system easier for taxpayers to administer should be a “priority” for his government. Alistair Darling, the new chancellor, could take new immediate steps to achieve tax simplification, separate to other areas “that should be looked at in the future,” the CIOT said. The appeal to simplify tax has been echoed by the PCG, the trade group for freelancers, which also put clarification of employment status top of its wishlist to Number 10. David Ramsden, chairman, said: “Freelancers face growing confusion about how they engage with clients, what their employment status is and how they're taxed. “The UK's freelancing model offers us a competitive edge in the global marketplace - the prime minister's new team must ensure that it is safeguarded for the future.” Employment status should be “clarified, simplified and set out in legislation” by the government, in a move that would “provide clear benefits to all parties,” the PCG said. In an editorial posted on its website, the group vowed to pursue the issue, saying it hoped to continue “constructive dialogue” with the Labour government on issues affecting freelancing. However, PCG said it was ‘disappointed’ that the line-up for the Business Council for Britain does not include a representative of small firms or freelance consultants. Not only do these smaller private sector outfits employ the majority of the UK workforce, but everyday “hundreds of thousands of professional freelancers in the UK…make a valuable contribution to the diverse economy of this country.” Mr Ramsden added: “They are innovative, flexible hard-working people who are often penalised simply because they don't fit the old fashioned notion of being either an employee or an employer.” Jul 3, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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