1.  A fifth (21%) of Senior Responsible Owners of mission critical and high risk IT-enabled programmes had not met with the nominated Minister and a further 28% met the Minister less than once a quarter. For these major high risk undertakings to succeed, Ministers need to be briefed fully and candidly at least quarterly on risks, progress and cost escalations, including key findings from Gateway Reviews and mission critical reporting, and assessment of the performance of suppliers and contractors.

2.  The role of the Chief Information Officer Council, comprising senior board level representatives of all major government departments, is not yet clear and its profile remains low. The Council offers the potential to identify key risks to the delivery of programmes and projects and to drive up and ensure greater consistency of practice and performance across government. It needs to raise its game, acting more like its American counterpart to become a key influence in government IT by, for example:

• reporting regularly on the emerging risks around the Government's portfolio of IT-enabled programmes and projects, and making informed judgements about the Government's capacity to handle that portfolio;
• providing authoritative advice and promoting good practice, and encouraging the greater use of tools and techniques such as the IT industry body Intellect's Concept Viability Service to help test at an early point the robustness of new IT-enabled plans and proposals; and
• acting to strengthen relationships with the supplier community; for example by seeking ways to encourage the involvement of smaller suppliers through streamlining and standardising processes such as pre-qualification questionnaires.

3.  The Payment Modernisation Programme and Pension Credit demonstrate that success can be achieved in major Government IT-enabled programmes and projects. Evidence from across government shows that to replicate this success more widely, departments need to make significant changes to their management practices. For example:

• more than 70% of Heads of Centres of Excellence remain concerned about a lack of programme and project management skills within departments; and
• over half of Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) are in their first SRO role, and nearly half spend less than 20% of their time on such duties. Lack of relevant experience, combined with a regular turnover of post-holders, adds unnecessary risk to the management of IT-enabled change.

• To address these issues, departments should appoint a Senior Responsible Owner at the outset of an IT-enabled business change on the presumption that he or she will remain in post until the programme or project is delivered, with performance and reward linked to agreed targets and milestones.

4.  Within departments, there is a lack of clarity about the respective roles of Chief Information Officers and Centres of Excellence, and how, in turn, they should support individual Senior Responsible Owners of programmes and projects. 38% of Senior Responsible Owners, for example, have no involvement with their Centre of Excellence. The Office of Government Commerce and the Delivery and Transformation Group should set out clearly for departments their expectations of Chief Information Officers, Centres of Excellence, and Senior Responsible Owners. Departments should in turn translate these into clear management hierarchies and reporting structures at a local level.

5.  There is potential confusion between the Delivery and Transformation Group's initiatives to strengthen the IT Profession through the Technology in Business Fast Stream and the wider Professional Skills for Government agenda, and the role of the Office of Government Commerce in developing the Programme and Project Management Specialism. To obtain the full benefit of these initiatives and to build the collective IT knowledge base across government, they need to be overseen by a single body with a clear brief to develop career paths and succession planning. This should include developing and consolidating individuals' skills over a succession of major programmes and projects and ensuring that the contributions of successful teams are exploited fully.

6.  The lessons from Gateway Reviews are not shared consistently across departments, with only some three quarters of Centres of Excellence routinely receiving such Reviews. Within departments, Gateway Reviews and mission critical reporting should form the focus for regular discussions between the Chief Information Officer, Centre of Excellence and Senior Responsible Owners. Departments need also to seek the views and concerns of suppliers in Gateway Reviews.

7.  Of all the IT-enabled programmes and projects that had completed a Gate 4 (Readiness for service) Gateway Review by June 2005, only a third had by June 2006 completed a Gate 5 (Benefits evaluation) Review. Following the example of the Payment Modernisation Programme, departments should appoint a senior nominated individual to make sure that Gate 5 Reviews occur within twelve months of a preceding Gate 4 Review, and to ensure that new IT processes are exploited to achieve their full potential, as would be the case with an expensive IT investment in the commercial world.

8.  Where IT-enabled programmes and projects have succeeded, the organisations concerned were clear about the business process they wanted to change and the outcome they wanted to achieve. In the case of Pension Credit, for example, the project team were thus enabled to resist demands for unnecessary alterations to the initial specification. Britannia Building Society's board kept control over changes to its "Really Big" transformation programme by requiring expenditure over a 3% contingency to be referred to the board. Where changes to original specifications are planned that involve expenditure or time delays beyond any pre-agreed thresholds, the Senior Responsible Owner should re-submit the business case to the departmental board, setting out why a change is necessary and providing an assessment of the risks associated with the change.

9.  The Office of Government Commerce and the Delivery and Transformation Group have not had the power to halt failing programmes and projects. The Treasury's new Major Projects Review Group will however be reviewing all new business cases for high risk or mission critical programmes and projects for robustness and deliverability in order to ensure that departments do not embark on ill thought out ventures. It will need well rehearsed action plans to intervene to stop programmes and projects that begin to falter.

10.  Nearly half of Audit Committees are not briefed on the results of all Gateway Reviews. To fulfil their key role in providing independent scrutiny and oversight of a department's portfolio of programmes and projects, Audit Committees need regular briefing about the status of those activities and information about emerging risks. The Statement on Internal Control signed annually by the Accounting Officer should confirm that the Audit Committee has received this information.

11.  Very little has been made public about the identity or performance of the mission critical programmes and projects that underpin much of the Government's IT strategy. In response to the Committee's request, however, the Office of Government Commerce has provided a list of the 90 mission critical programmes and projects agreed with departments in July 2006.[2] This is an important first step in improving the transparency of departments' management of IT-enabled change, but it needs to be extended into regular reviews of the progress and performance of individual programmes and projects within the Annual Report of the Delivery and Transformation Group.[3]

3   The first Annual Report was published in January 2007: www.cio.gov.uk/documents/annual_report2006/trans_gov2006.pdf Back