Part of a much deeper malaise

Sadly, the departure of Richard Granger is symptomatic of the way big projects like this often go.

Some involved in this project were smart enough to cut and run months ago, when the taxpayers money started to dry up and the writing was on the wall. They hired slick lawyers to get them off paying contract penalties, too. The less fortunate, who stayed on, have practically been bled to death.

Nobody in an official position seems able to say, in unambiguous terms, what has been delivered and there's very careful avoidance of concrete time lines and budgets; a very bad sign. It says something for Granger, I suppose, that he was prepared to sustain this amount of career damage and serve out (most of) his five year term.

Unfortunately, on the whole, the people who run these big projects tend to excel at manipulating networks of business relationships and meetings, acquiring status and grandiose titles, but they lack the managerial and engineering acumen to pull off a big project.

That's an important reason why (depending on whose statistics you believe) something like 80% of big IT projects fail when measured against their startup criteria. They're not more inherently risky than, say, building a motorway, but fail they do. I doubt whether this failure rate would be acceptable in civil engineering projects of a similar size.

IT seems to have been particularly unfortunate in acquiring a class of pseudo-professional 'project managers' who equate high status, big budgets and a ton of paperwork with delivering something real. The warning signs are often ignored until the thing has gone way over time, way over budget and delivered very little of substance.

As many Reg readers may know, the term 'City Slackers' has been coined to describe such people. Apart from the designer suits, blackberries and over-specified laptops, their main distinguishing characteristic is a CV full of 'successful projects'. Closer examination reveals that these are projects they have left at just the right moment, before, as another reader says: "enormous quantities of excrement collide with the the spinning bladed thing".

Unfortunately, there's no driver for change here. This culture is self-perpetuating. Who wants to do the real work, when there's a great career to be had, at the tax payers risk and expense, by swanning through a bunch of meetings, landing one plum job after another, without actually delivering anything?

Exactly what has NPfIT delivered? And how much has it really cost? I think we should be told! Or will we all have to wait for the Public Enquiry?