Monday, 7 December 2009
Digital Inclusion
How does Gordon know? Can we as taxpayers inspect any functional requirements, examine the business case maybe, or peruse the plans outlining which service will come on line when. It must be that the estimate of the financial benefits, and the cost (which was not revealed) do have some foundation in analysis, but we have no way of knowing.
This is all the work of Martha Lane Fox, who recently joined the government as Champion of Digital Inclusion, so all this maybe a bit last minute. On Martha's site however she does provide a link to this report from PricewaterhouseCoopers where at least the thinking behind the initiative has been shared. However we look forward to more digital inclusion .
(NB we like the way thae PricewaterhouseCoopers use logic chains to map the benefits: Input > Activity > Output > Outcome > Impact)
Monday, 23 November 2009
IT Should Lead Business Change

Sunday, 22 November 2009
Pigs Cannot Fly

Sunday, 15 November 2009
A Sense of Urgency About Change
Here John Kotter talks about how important it is to bring the outside, into the inside of organisations to fuel their sense of urgency about change. Too often he explains that the calm interior of the organisation does not reflect the challenge and conflict of the market place. It is analogous to a shell landing on the British generals in WW1, who drank claret and studied their maps in luxurious chateaux while the Battle of the Somme raged fifty miles away.
Delivering a Project is Not the End

Benefits management is about ensuring that the key benefits of any change are properly identified, e.g. increased efficiency or more effective service delivery, and that these benefits are made to come alive in the business. Benefits management should ensure that the programme can define exactly what each benefit will deliver in a way that can be measured, and that every benefit can be mapped to a planned outcome, and every outcome linked to a project deliverable. Furthermore every benefit should also be assigned to an owner who will be responsible and accountable for its eventual realisation.
Too often programme managers set their sights on an end date and project delivery, but that is just the start of delivering the benefits. To paraphrase the great man, delivering the programme is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Porridge Best Served Cold

Secondly, accurate reports to ministers on any problems were not produced. A senior member of the committee, said it was "incredible that for three years nobody senior knew what was being delivered for the money spent". The PAC were told that people had asked questions but were told that "actually the programme was all going well".
Thirdly, the senior responsible owner (SRO) of the project had never run an IT project before. MPs on the committee were unable to ascertain why she had been appointed SRO.
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Bad Business Cases Cost Lives
Resource in any organisation is carefully rationed, so a successful business case sign off, can mean that you win and someone else loses, and winning and losing is the body politic of any organisation. Winning is career enhancing, losing is not.
In our MOD case study there are not only ambitious individuals climbing the greasy pole, but there is fierce inter-service rivalry. Cash spent on a new Trident submarine for the Navy, can mean less helicopters in Afghanistan for the RAF, but failing to have adequate scrutiny of any of the projects means that the MOD becomes overstretched and fails to deliver :
This overheating arises from a mixture of incentives within the Ministry of Defence. In particular, the Armed Forces, competing for scarce funding, quite naturally seek to secure the largest share of resources for their own needs, and have a systematic incentive to underestimate the likely cost of equipment.
Unfortunately the current system is not able to flush out at an early stage the real costs of this equipment, nor does it make effective prioritisation or rationalisation decisions. As the MoD almost never cancels an equipment order, the process of over-ordering and under-costing is not constrained by fear on the part of those ordering equipment that the programme will be lost.
Equipment plan construction is dominated by a “bottom up” aggregation process, which makes it hard for “top down” strategic guidance to control the balance of investment. Effective forums do not currently exist to allow top down guidance to control the evolution of the equipment programme.
These forces and incentives create an over-large equipment programme, which contains within it a significant underestimate of the likely out-turn, making the programme even less affordable than it appears at any given moment in time. When this over-large and inflating programme meets the hard cash planning totals that the MoD can spend each year, the Department is left with no choice but to slow down its rate of spend on programmes across the board.
The result is that programmes take significantly longer than originally estimated, because the Department cannot afford to build them at the originally planned rate.
All this would be bad enough in any organisation, but cost cutting in the MOD can cost lives, as the report by Charles Haddon-Cave QC into the death of 14 service personnel who died in 2006, when a Nimrod crashed in Afghanistan, so clearly demonstrates. Unfortunately it does not stop there, as this excellent article from the Independent illustrates.