Archive for the 'project failure' Category

Project branded as “A master class of misadministration”

Published
by
Ron
on October 27, 2009
in failed projects, project, project delays and project failure
. 0 Comments

There have been many articles in the press and on TV and radio complaining about the Single Payment Scheme which has culminated in a damning report by National Audit Office (NAO).

The report published has hit the headlines here in the UK for another poorly delivered project and suggests that:

“The implementation of the single payment scheme encountered difficulties that could result in the European Commission imposing a sizeable penalty.” In addition, the main complaint from UK farmers has been they have had to wait inordinately long times to receive payments. “The difficulties in making payments have caused distress to a significant minority of farmers and undermined the farming industry’s confidence in the Agency” suggested the report.

Switch now to the Editorial in Computer Weekly who commented on the report:

“Nothing changes. When a department gets covered with opprobrium by an NAO report, the relevant minister goes on BBC’s Today programme with what could be a yellowing script.

The routine is to disparage, in measured tones, the NAO’s figures, and then say that good progress is has been made, ideally topped with a generous helping of statistics.
MPs, the media and the public are left with no inkling that parts of the department are in administrative anarchy.

It’s not surprising then that the NAO’s Director Philip Gibby expressed his frustration, at a press conference last week, at having to revisit the Single Payment Scheme in a third report. Each time he is assured that progress is being made.

So can we trust the government’s assurances about the IT? Can we trust the government’s assurances on the state of any big IT-based project or programme?

We believe that government IT failures keep happening largely because they operate in a sunshine-and-roses universe in which truth and reality are poisons nobody goes anywhere near. Not departments. Not their agencies. And not their ministers. Thank goodness then for the NAO.”

There are some incredibly strong words in the Computer Weekly Editorial about a UK Government project :

“….failures keep happening largely because they operate in a sunshine-and-roses universe in which truth and reality are poisons nobody goes anywhere near…

It left me wondering whether your company operates in an area where truth and reality are places where people openly go. How much effort and energy is put into creating truth and reality or is it simply an area where few people go?

The full NAO Report can be found here

 

Learning from project failures

Published
by
Ron
on June 24, 2009
in learning, project and project failure
. 1 Comment

I recently wrote a blog called Project failure - Do We Ever Learn . This is not the first time I have written about learning and project management so imagine my surprise when I saw a report from National Audit Office (NAO) called “Helping Government Learn”. Now before you are all turned off from reading, this is a good read; it contains a lot of valuable learning!

I nail my colours to the mast here; I started my career as a trainer and consultant. I saw the workplace as a great place to learn. It is a rich place to gain knowledge and skills but, not everyone thinks as I do!

There have been many reports on government projects before so why is this different? This report takes a different slant. It looks at learning; suggesting it is a key organisational issue. The report from the NAO identified a number of points:

• 90% of management boards rarely discuss learning at their meetings
• they suggested that silo structures prevent learning across the civil service
• there are ineffective mechanisms to support learning
• there is a high turnover within the workforce
• there a lack of time for learning

It seems that sharing learning within the civil service is not common. However, how common is it in the company where you work? My experience suggests there are few organizations that really do learn from projects.

Now some of you reading this may well say so what? The problem is actually very simple; unless we learn from our mistakes (and our successes); we will only continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

The report suggests a number of changes:

• making staff feel it is safe to speak about project failure

• encouraging knowledge sharing by project teams

• ensuring that there is systematic reflection on performance during and after a project - even if it means delaying moving on to the next project for a while

• make sure learning from consultants is captured before they leave - build it into the contract

The report is almost 60 pages long, has videos to support it and you can download it here . Let’s hope we can all learn - from each other!

Vote on project success…or project failure

Published
by
Ron
on May 9, 2009
in project failure
. 0 Comments

My thanks to Lee Fischman who has suggested in his words:

 ”I’ve decided a grass roots effort might be interesting counterpoint to the Standish report. I created a single-question survey here:”

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=oOq7Hzgz6BCYZfgZoNC72w_3d_3d

And will be posting results here:

http://swprojectsurvey.blogspot.com/

Do contribute to the debate amd thanks again Lee for this.

Project managers plan for failure rather than success

Published
by
Ron
on May 5, 2009
in change management, project and project failure
. 11 Comments

The above words came from a British Computer Society report recently published by Dr John McManus and Dr Trevor Wood-Harper. It comes hot on the heals of the Gartner Report which I mentioned in a blog last week.

The report examines 214 projects covering 1998 - 2005 with just over 40% of the project value being €10m-20m. The research highlights that only one in eight information management projects can be considered truly successful (failure being described as those projects that do not meet the original time, cost and quality requirements criteria).

Of the original 214 projects 51 were cancelled (23.8%). The authors cited a range of reasons for this which included:

• business strategy superseded
• poor requirements management
• business benefits not clearly communicated or overstated
• Governance issues within the contract

The report goes into more detail than I can here but it highlights yet again the problem of project failure. Is well worth a read.

This is the 2nd successive week I have written about a lack of success in the project management world. So, is project management getting better? To me, these statistics show that project management does not seem to be getting any better. However, what is your perspective on this? I had some interesting comments on Linkedin (www.linkedin.com) and at the end of my blog Project Management Is it Getting Worse? comments. I’d be really interested in your views.

You can read the report published by British Computer Society here 

Age Concern Project wound up

Published
by
Ron
on March 4, 2009
in project, project failure, project governance and project management
. 1 Comment

A recent report by the Charities Commission has severely criticised the charity Age Concern for its membership scheme called Heyday.

The scheme was established to attract around 3 million members within 5 years of launch in the age range 50 plus. Some of the members were paid for, some non-paying.

The main aim of Heyday according to the charity was to provide “information and voice”

Heyday has now been abandoned.

In its report, the Commissioners point out that the scheme cost some £22 million to set up and run and it failed dramatically to attract the 3 million members - attracting around 400,000 people.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Andrew Hinds the Chief Executive of the Charities Commission encouraged charities to be innovative but suggested trustees should be very careful of launching new projects after very careful look at the facts. He pointed out that Heyday did not meet its objectives.

He identified 3 areas of concern:

1. market research before the project was launched was not as strong as expected

2. analysis of risks was not as rigorous as it should have been

3. there were 34 members on the Age Concern Board - too many for effective decision making

Interestingly, there has been an internal review of the project however the Charity Commissions suggests that Age Concern carry out an independent external review which will be done once it completes a merger with Help the Aged in April of this year.

I believe we can all learn from each other and the report is well worth a read. You can see it here. You can also hear Andrew Hinds from the Charity Commission and the Chief Executive of Age Concern here.