With recent media investigations dealing with the extent of government waste, this item is not comforting to public sector project management professionals. We’ve reviewed ContractorUK’s report on this story, but more reports are available online, including here with the Telegraph and here with the BBC.
Particularly troubling (aside from the fact that the project deals with prison and probation services, creating security and public confidence issues) are the following lines from the article about the budget overrun and the extent of mismanagement of C-NOMIS:
The troubled project – C-NOMIS – was conceived at the Ministry of Justice in 2004, to build a single and shared computer system for the prison and probation services.
But “blunder after blunder by senior managers,” and a rocketing in its cost from £234m to £690m, means the project is now unable to deliver this core objective.
Instead of one integrated system to track all offenders, what was delivered was a “masterclass in sloppy project management,” added Edward Leigh, PAC chairman.
His Public Accounts Committee found management oversight on the project was “inadequate,” while its ambitious technical complexity was “significantly underestimated.”
Monitoring of the project budget was “absent,” change control was “weak” and poorly framed contracts let ailing IT suppliers wiggle out of delivering to time and cost.
“This committee hears of troubled government projects all too frequently,” Mr Leigh said, “but the litany of failings in this case are in a class of their own.”
The frustration of getting the job done wrong with overtly glaring flaws is one thing, but to fail to deliver so miserably AND drive up the project cost over 150% makes the struggles of C-NOMIS even more demoralizing.
ContractorUK’s article, based on a National Audit Office report on C-NOMIS, seemed a bit heavy-handed in talking about the project’s failures due to the nature of the report, but it did show balance by mentioning how the project seems to have made a turn for the better, though there still remain struggles in the matter of staffing, as dealing with private companies and a souring of the project stakeholders’ relationship with EDS, the IT supplier from C-NOMIS.
Reassuringly, the NAO said management of the IT programme has improved in recent months, particular by better financial control from NOMS.
Recruitment difficulties remain, however, leaving the programme “heavily reliant” on contracted-in staff and vacancies persist, although mainly in the lower and middle ranks.
Here’s hoping that the notion ‘There are no small parts, only small actors’ doesn’t hinder the recent progress and hopes for a full-fledged turnaround. Because it’s not just the lower and middle levels that have felt the sting of mis-management: Staffing issues have plagued the project, headed by the National Offender Management Service. In C-NOMIS’ early days, senior management recruitment issues were so rampant that the NAO feared for the project about the influx of freelance contractors ‘which could impact the central ability to manage effectively.’
Given that over a third of the project’s 137 roles were filled by freelancers, one key question remains: What does this mean for the image and widespread confidence in public sector project management contractors?
