It seems the Conservative Party knows a lot more about big IT projects than the people who are responsible for big IT projects.
Apparently they are considering putting a £100m cap on government IT contracts according to this BBC news report.
This is based on a report from Judge Business School, Cambridge.
Great idea. I have long considered that there is a certain size above which big public service projects are doomed to go pear shaped, no matter what.
Maybe the cap should be £10m and not £100m?
I can’t really be bothered to get into the whole open source thing although having open data standards across government would seem, er, sensible.
I just think that big IT projects don’t go according to plan.
But then thinking about it the really small ones don’t either!
Governmental projects anywhere suffer from major cost overruns and missed schedules.
I cannot remember an instance of one single Governmental project anywhere in the world that didn’t cost more than it was originally planned for.
Having said that, with the cap of 100 million, what will the government do if the project originally cost 80 million and then it went over this budget, will they cancel the project altogether?
I have published a 15 article series on mistakes in governmental projects mainly highlighting this point as well as 14 others.
IMO, a better way to solve this problem is to have better metrics rather than to cap projects.
Comment by PM Hut — January 28, 2009 @ 8:54 pm