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When Edward Leigh, chairman of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC), described the story of the development of Defra's Rural Payments Agency as "a master-class in bad decision making," he was not just speaking rhetorically. The project broke so many of the rules of government IT project management, painfully established over more than three decades, that it ought to be included in the training of all government technology staff and senior civil servants. The single-farm payment scheme was introduced in 2005/2006 as part of a series of EU agricultural reforms. In most EU countries -including new member states, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland- a simple system was devised and implemented within the allowed timescale. But according to the PAC, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) sought to implement the most complex reform model in the shortest possible time, an approach which “led to a series of risks which individually would have been severe but collectively were unmanageable”. They had also "underestimated the amount of work involved”. Objectives were muddled from the outset, because of the decision to incorporate the work into an existing business change programme. The computer system became a key feature of the Agency's plans to reduce staff numbers. This meant that at the same time as bringing in the system, the department was busy sacking the people with the experience to make it work -over 1000 of them -and landed itself with a bill of over £14 million in hiring contractors and other temporary staff. The PAC comment simply restates what anybody who has ever been involved in a large project could have told the RPA: “Before combining projects, their interdependency and the potential for compounding risk should be assessed as well as the risks of the individual projects.” Contrary to advice from the Office of Government Commerce, Defra and the Agency put in place two Senior Responsible Owners to oversee the project, one, in Defra, responsible for policy and one, in the Agency, responsible for implementation. The well-remunerated sackee Johnston McNeill, then Chief Executive of the RPA, therefore had to implement policy decisions to which he had not always been party. The Department and Agency has also established separate boards to provide technical programme management and critical challenge, but there was “a lack of clarity as to which Board or individual was ultimately responsible for decisions”. The challenge board took a greater role in decision making as the project proceeded, blurring its scrutiny role. “There needs to be a clear distinction within project governance structures between those responsible for oversight and challenge and those managing the decision-making process, even when a project reaches a crisis point,” the PAC says. The timetable to develop the system was based on assumptions on the likely policy content of the final EU Payments scheme. By December 2004, however, the Agency had identified 23 changes needed to meet the actual requirement. The PAC says “implementation of the project started before the specification of the single payment scheme was finalised… The risk of having to make changes later in the development of the scheme could have been given more weight in determining the implementation timetable at the outset.” They put off the go-live date for the system for three months, but in the meantime, the PAC says, pressure on the timetable also led to the Agency accepting IT components before they had been fully tested. This is GCSE-level IT project management. The Agency had tested each key element of the IT scheme before introduction, but as the PAC points out “testing in isolation did not fully simulate the real world environment and problems emerged later. Failure to test computer systems completely and adequately is a problem we have often seen with government IT projects.” (And they can say that again!) “Time should be built in to test the IT systems as a whole as well as the individual components within it to obtain adequate assurance that components are fully compatible and deliver the required business process.” The project had not been properly scoped, and this extended to estimates of processing capacity, which had not taken sufficient account of the number of maps and mapping changes that would need to be processed. “A proper estimate of the scale of the work should be made by appropriate modelling and testing,” the PAC says. GCSE-level again. The system was subject to four Office of Government Commerce Gateway Reviews between May 2004 and February 2006, and three of these Reviews assessed the programme as "red". Development work on the computer system nevertheless continued and no contingency plan was invoked, despite limited confidence that the system would be ready on time. In fact, the project lacked “genuine workable contingency arrangements.” The RPA justified its decision to go ahead without by saying that any contingency arrangement would have relied on the same data. However, the PAC says, “90% of the 2005 payment was based on amounts received by farmers in the past, and the number of claims at just over 116,000 was relatively small so that contingency arrangements to maintain farmers' cash flow should have been practicable”. Testing had already been thrown overboard to meet project milestones. Next went the management information systems which would have enabled the project to monitor its own progress, so that it wasn't until the end of February 2006 that it became clear to the Agency that it would not be able to meet the target of paying claims by the end of March. “In the absence of reliable management data, the project team and officials were unable to draw adequately informed conclusions and were not sufficiently alive to the likelihood of failure and its consequences,” says the PAC. Although the Agency's management team recognised the risks to delivery of the project, the PAC says Chief Executive, Johnston McNeill “felt unable to show that it could not be delivered”. Staff should have blown the whistle: “If Accounting Officers believe that their assessment of risk is being discounted, the proper course of action is to seek a direction from the departmental Accounting Officer or Minister concerned as to whether they should proceed”. All this sounds very familiar -yet the UK sets itself up as a world leader in government IT project management, and the Office of Government Commerce sells British methodologies like Prince 2 around the world. How long before potential customers start wondering whether or not they should be buying project management expertise from a country that, on its own ground, seems incapable of developing an accounting system for a whelk stall? Nick Langley Sep 10, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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