How to Handle Project Failures

Many organisations plough on with a project in the hope that the solution being delivered by their external IT partner will eventually meet their business requirements.

For IT partners or suppliers on the other hand they are faced with the challenge of trying to deliver the solution defined in the procurement phase and all too often clients with evolving business requirements.

The scenario then develops where the project team manage a complex change control process which sadly will have built in ambiguity as to which party will pick up the costs for changes, modifications, enhancements etc

Sadly at some point the relationship between the two parties deteriorates and the project is stopped and the respective parties call in their legal representatives. There is rarely any arbitration or cooling off process and at this stage the project is dead but the legal effort and associated costs is about to snowball

As a practitioner I have always assumed the outcomes of legal cases are kept out of the public domain as organisations rarely 'wash their dirty laundry in public' and so valuable lessons learnt are not available for the project management and business community therefore to review.

Having been involved in a recent legal dispute and acting as a project management witness for a Systems Integrator, I came across an interesting organisation called the IT Group. They specialise in IT disputes and one of their areas of expertise is addressing IT Failures

http://www.itgroup-uk.com/consultancy/it-outsourcing-and-project-failure-s

The IT Group have worked on a number of high profile project failures to help their client seek redress

• NHS Patient Records (NPfIT)
• Building for Schools Programme
• CSC outsourcing of IT for BAe Systems
• BT outsourcing of IT support for Essex County Council Vertex BPO contract for Westminster City Council

What would be useful for the Project Management Community is to identify the underlying causes of the above project failures but I am pretty sure many of us can take a good stab at a few e.g. NPfIT

The Cabinet Office ( I worked in this organisation 2009 to 2011 and was responsible for developing best practice and supporting failing projects) created the Major Projects Authority to oversee and more importantly reduce the risk of further high profile public sector project failures. When they looked at the DWP Universal Credit Programme they found;

'Universal Credit project set out to use agile methodologies, but this quickly foundered and was effectively scrapped'

Which beggars question why such a high profile project was not managed using established and suitable project methodologies such as MSP, PRINCE2 etc and the project gambled on using Agile techniques!

Sadly the public sector never learns the lessons and the following headlines to often appear

Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "DWP seems to have embarked on this crucial project, expected to cost the taxpayer some £2.4bn, with little idea as to how it was actually going to work. Confusion and poor management at the highest levels have already resulted in delays and at least £34m wasted on developing IT. If the department doesn’t get its act together, we could be on course for yet another catastrophic government IT failure."

Surely there has to be a better way of managing projects and avoiding IT Failures?

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