By Daniel Jones, Partner and Director, Public Sector, TPI
I recently attended the annual British Computing Society Lovelace Lecture in London. The lecturer, Maurice Perks, an IBM fellow, chose as his presentation title “The sins of IT projects and why they can fail”. He had boiled his experience down to 10 sins, having started originally with 7, deadly of course, and at one point having a list of 30. No doubt most of us could easily add to his list of 10!
I started with low expectations, as the theme is one that is regularly reported on by government bodies in the UK, with a list of reasons that looks depressingly familiar. The initial temptation was to wonder why we were not talking about how we get better by learning from past mistakes; which of course we did discuss as the evening progressed. In the event, Maurice delivered some very valuable insights across the whole spectrum of technical, operational, business and user perspectives. Sourcing was mentioned, but more in passing than as a main theme.
So what did I take away from the evening? Three things are very clear:
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Select a supplier based on their ability to demonstrate use and adherence to robust methods that ensure that points of failure are avoided (e.g. interfaces that simply don’t join up or systems that don’t scale).
This, in turn, requires a good understanding of where the risks lie and of how best to mitigate them; just giving the end to end problem to one supplier may seem like a risk transfer, but it can go horribly wrong if the supplier lacks the engineering capabilities required.
- Large-scale projects need to be planned and sourced with rigour; especially since they are unavoidable for many governments. They must also be flexible – due to the time it takes to deliver – with reasonable deadlines for completion. This requires honest and open dialogue in the sourcing process.
- When running a sourcing process, it is vital to arrive at the contract award point with both the buying team and the supplier team ready and excited by the transition to delivery. Too often, at the end of major public sector procurement, both teams just want a holiday.
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