back to article A third of UK.gov big projects will fail in next five years, warns NAO

Blighty's spending watchdog has warned that one third of the government's major projects due to be delivered over the next five years are on track to fail. The National Audit Office said, in its progress report on major government projects, that 37 out of the 106 projects due to finish by 2021 are "in doubt or unachievable if …

  1. xj650t
    Coat

    And in other news

    Bears sh1t in the woods and call me Dave couldn't arrange a piss up in a brewery.

    Mine's the one with less cash in the pocket because we're all in this together.

  2. Locky

    A third of UK.gov big projects will fail in next five years

    The other two thirds will fail in years six to ten....

  3. Why Not?
    FAIL

    Funny we get in trouble if we are out by 5-10% on ROI, cost or time estimates made in the planning stage. This is before the grown ups change the scope of the project to satisfy their political needs.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A look on the bright side

    The good news is 99% of government projects are completely unnecessary. So by them failing the taxpayer is saving money!

    1. Teiwaz

      Re: A look on the bright side

      What bright side?

      The projects will go over-budget first in a panicked last minute attempt to save it, then have to be re-commissioned, probably for three times the price, which will in turn fail.

      It's like paying to heat a house with no windows no roof and no doors, pointlessly expensive to heat and no one lives there anyway...

      It seems like it's the modern method of wasting production for Ingsoc.

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        Re: A look on the bright side

        >It seems like it's the modern method of wasting production for Ingsoc

        No, it's the modern way of paying people to dig holes and fill them up again transforming taxes into dividends and bonuses.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A look on the bright side

          No, it's the modern way of transforming taxes....

          About half of the the whole life costs of the MPP are not officially recognised as taxes. So the Major Projects Portfolio list totals about £430bn of full life project costs, and in a whole five minutes analysis I can identify £153bn of DECC scheme costs that will be coming through on your electricity bills, and then there's £50 odd billion for HS2, supposedly self funding.

  5. Peter2 Silver badge

    So, now the National Audit Office has recognised that about 30% of these projects are going to fail what preceisely is being done to prevent these projects from failing?

    Could El Reg perhaps make enquiries with our glorious leaders as to if anything is being done to correct the deficencies identified, or halt the projects in question? Failing that, if everybody is going to ignore the NAO then why are they bothering to audit things in the first place?

    1. Commswonk

      So, now the National Audit Office has recognised that about 30% of these projects are going to fail what precisely is being done to prevent these projects from failing?

      Probably very little or nothing, for the simple reason that they cannot identify which 30% is actually destined for failure. It's akin to "X% of the advertising budget is wasted, but we don't know which X% it is".

  6. Tim99 Silver badge

    I'm surprised

    Most measurements show that the typical failure rate for large projects is between 70% and 100%.

    Who knew that HMG was so good?

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: I'm surprised

      Came here to make a similar point; was happy to see it had already been made.

      Really, a failure rate in the 30% range is doing quite well, comparatively speaking. That doesn't say much good about the IT industry as a whole, of course.

  7. Otto is a bear.

    Well Da..

    Initiated by politicians who won't be in post when delivered.

    Project specified by consultants who don't have to deliver.

    Procured by competitive tender managed by procurement consultants and lawyers, who don't have to deliver.

    Implemented by the lowest cost consortium, the prime doesn't deliver it all.

    Accepted by consultants incentivised to delay delivery.

    Paid for by procurement departments incentivised to cut costs.

    What could possibly go wrong.

    1. PeterFV

      Re: Well Da..

      You missed out requirements and testing (Sigh. Again.): "Requirements written by semi-literates, never reviewed by people who know (because they're too busy fire-fighting), accepted by their bosses (who cannot read let alone think) and tested by staff who know they are messengers and will be shot if they tell the truth".

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe...

    ..if they didn't keep outsourcing to unheard-of third party consultancies who only seem to recruit by dangling big carrots in front of contractors like myself to give incentive to join up to a dying beached-whale of a project, they'd actually complete something?

    A few months ago I got a random cold-call from a consultancy firm asking if I was available. I was coming up to the end of the contract I was working on so thought 'whats the harm'. All telephone interviews, I might add.

    First interview they couldn't/wouldn't tell me who the client was. Project was working within a 'big data' environment. They had a hitlist of buzzwords to strike off and that got me through to round 2.

    Second technical interview the chap I was interviewed by was just an engineer drafted in at last minute who didn't have any idea who the client was or the project, or any of the technologies involved. Despite the obvious shortcomings I was able to get through to the next round.

    Next was a technical test which involved fixing a broken build using a deployment technology I'd never used in anger (nor was it on my CV, but you know, it's all "Devops"). Being reasonably proficient with google, half an hour and cup of tea later it was done, and sent off. Passed.

    Finally I got through to have an interview with someone was actually working on said project.

    They finally admitted who the client was, and it was at this point what little enthusiasm I had for the role in question disappeared entirely, as it turned out it was for a well-known gov department who have been in the news a lot lately for all the wrong reasons.

    Subsequent searches on the consultancy firm showed it has only been in operation a couple years, and one of the main shareholders is a member of the tory party.

    Fuck. Right. Off.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Maybe...

      AC for obv reasons

      Getting picked for gov contract (based on my v. limited experience) depends if your (companies) face fits to quite an extent.

      A company I used to work for failed in a gov contract despite being considerably the cheapest option (contract was in an area we were niche specialist in), and we were *not* doing a loss leader bid as we had implemented an essentially identical solution for a Foreign gov (except, unlike the UK solution, that was multi lingual and so more complex) and thus we had solution pretty much ready to go out the box, just a matter of needing en-gb resx files and UK gov specific branding look and feel in the CSS / images.

      The other solution has been fully described as part of bid process and UK gov had been given the OK to ask Foreign gov dept for their feedback.

      We gave gov a trial of our vanilla solution (no en-gb texts in resx, using en-US resx from Foreign solution, but not an issue as we just told them it was trial version with Americanized spelling), - not allowed to give gov internal demo for security reasons.

      We hosted externally, they accessed it via web UI, ony difference to on site install would be speed (slower as web bandwidth typically lower than internal networks & longer data round trips) and (as we were not allowed access) integration with their userdata (e.g. we had functionality to easily map LDAP groups / users to users roles with appropriate permissions / powers on our system) so they could not see single sign on functionality nor could they use our desktop standalone clients (a minor issues as those clients for admin users anyway & all general use can be tried via web UI) .

      We also imported a huge chunk of (non sensitive) data provide by gov so it could be seen with real world amount of large data for assessing performance & they had success with our solution (only thing we had to do was make a couple of tweaks to web UI as they had some gov offices that used ancient (long out of standard MS support unless they had negotiated extended cover) versions of IE that should have been nuked from orbit but were needed for some internal "solutions").

      So, despite gov trialling the solution with success (able to see as much of the software as their no onsite install policy allowed) the contract went elsewhere to a company that had got a lot of different gov contracts, various conflicting reasons given as to why we failed including "we were too small a company" - despite company being in business fr years, using mainstream technology (we were MS partners) and all code in escrow at nominal extra cost, and "the bid was far too low, all competitors were much higher so must be something wrong with your bid" - except they knew we had a working solution, not vapour-ware, hence we could do a low cost bid.

      We did absolutely zero schmoozing - so no hospitality at Wimbledon, England games, meals at Michelin starred eateries etc., etc., who knows whether that affected our bid.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    No, this is good!

    The GDS agile approch to 'fail fast' has taken root in Govt IT. Or something.

  10. N2
    Trollface

    Seems optimistic to me

    I thought the failure rate was 100%

  11. Graham Marsden
    WTF?

    What...?

    ... Only a third???

  12. N_ITDirector

    IT Skills

    As a serving IT Director for two police forces in England, holding onto or attracting the right skills to a Police ICT department is almost impossible. My forces have just been through a job evaluation process (13 Factor) which has, for example, graded Oracle DBA's with a salary banding of £26-£29k. My DBA resource are quite rightly now leaving the organisation as jobs in the discipline are abundant and well paid in comparison. Despite my continuing protests the organisation is wedded to the scheme and will not budge on salaries, therefore it is clearly demonstrable that the public sector do not have a clue about staff retention for IT, so it comes as no surprise to me that projects fail. A business is only ever as good as the staff it employs, with the governments digital agenda surely employing the right skills and experience to facilitate transformational change is paramount to success, "pay peanuts get monkeys" - failure is the only guaranteed outcome.

    1. sc-009

      Re: IT Skills

      Ahhhh, perhaps if those making the decisions were accountable and not contracted consultants "delivering" solutions as trophies for their CVs.

      Of course, they all leave before the its formally accepted the project will fail so it must have been someone elses fault "it was a marvelous initiative, it when to pieces when we left" ha!

  13. Cincinnataroo

    Time to move on

    A civilisation dependent on this nonsense will award itself a Darwin Prize. What are you doing for when it gets its just deserts?

  14. Tom -1
    Unhappy

    @ Michael Wojcik

    30% of all big projects doesn't mean 30% of big IT projects. About 50% of the government's big IT projects are expected to fail.

    And all NAO saying 50% of big gov IT projects will fail in the next 5 years means is that NAO is still stupidly optimistic about government IT. After all, govenment is still using the firms who created all the total disasters that government IT has suffered in the last few decades, so the result should be predictable.

    Sometimes I wonder is the projects would suddenltystart succeeding instead of failing if the government adopted a policy where the rewards for the big contractors were greater for success than for failure, inded if the contractors paid for their failures instead of us taxpayers rewarding them for failing. Unortunately our politicians have the strength neither to override the civil servants on the contract terms that they hand out to the big boys who might see them all right in "retirement", nor to override the desires of their fellow politicians who have something to gain from the usual incompetents getting the usual ridiculously generous terms.

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