Do You Want To Make Your Service Provider Partnerships Work?
71% of projects involving strategic service providers in IT, outsourcing, or shared services are delivered at double the budget and timescale. BPG can help to prevent such outcomes.
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The report Government and IT- “A Recipe For Rip-Offs”: Time For A New Approach published by the Public Administration Committee states that a complete overhaul of the entire system of procurement is needed to eliminate the ‘cartel’ of big IT firms and obscene amounts of public money being wasted on ineffectual IT schemes. Prime Minister David Cameron vowed to end the era of vast Government IT projects that he said had dominated
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We read that Partnership for Schools (PfS) the government quango that was in charge of the £55 billion Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative will be abolished by April 2012. Considering the BSF programme was scrapped in Summer 2010 this one has run for longer than many. It seems that patience finally ran out when PfS seemed serially unable to publish correct lists about which Schools would remain in
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Severn Trent Water (STW) is blaming a possible hosepipe ban on their new £70million computer system. It is claimed that challenges caused by their new SAP system are delaying the fixing of leaks, meaning targets are not being met and staff morale is at an all-time low. This isn’t good news. But leakage of time and money can be stopped, and stopped quickly. The good news is that problematic major projects, such
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Whitehall has a major problem with its financial controls, the central government’s spending watchdog has said in a report published recently, despite various improvements. The report, “Progress in improving financial management in government” published by the NAO, states that a number of departments “often have a legacy of multiple IT systems which do not adequately interface with each other. There is rarely an automatic cascade of data from management accounting systems
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As we have pointed out before, 87% of major outsourcing and IT projects fail at some point in their lifetime. Budget blowouts and timescale overruns are common but a recent court ruling now ensures that vendors have more responsibility to get these errant projects back on track. This ruling is very helpful – particularly where you have a vendor that is acting in a less than helpful manner. By taking into
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Most large outsourcing, service commissioning and IT/software contracts go wrong at some point in their lifetime. In fact, research demonstrates that between 56% to 87% are either cancelled after millions have been spent, or the purchasing organisation ends up investing twice as much and the project takes twice as long to implement as was originally contracted for. We have found over the hundreds of projects that we have been involved in that some
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A politician from Wales has just realised that all is not fair in love and Twitter… Welsh Politician Colin Elsbury ‘tweeted’ that another Councillor, Edward (John) Talbot, had been taken from a polling station by Police in June 2009 (at the time of the local election). It turned out this statement was untrue. He has learned a costly lesson. He now has to pay £3,000 plus court costs. Ironically the
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Council Chief Executive Receives no Redundancy Package. A Sign of Things to Come? In order to save £130k per annum, the Chief Executive of Swansea Council, Paul Smith, is stepping down early. Following a review of Swansea Council’s management structure and costs, the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) recommended that Paul Smith step down to help reduce the overheads of the council. Moreover, the WLGA recommended that Mr Smith should not receive
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The judgment in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) proceedings was handed down last month. The action was brought by Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, Waltham Forest London Borough Council, Luton Borough Council and Nottingham City Council, Newham London Borough Council and Kent County Council. Michael Gove’s statement on the judgment is can be found here. This case has turned out to be a bit of a pyrrhic victory for the
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We have recently been instructed to review a major software development project for a client in the insurance and financial services field. Using the ‘Agile’ project management methodology to develop the project rapidly in five stages, the end to end cost of this project was supposed to be £2m and completed in 18 months. As we review the current status of the project, it looks like this: Costs have escalated
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