@ Robert Hill

"Statitically, one third of all IT projects basically succeed, one third delivery but with compromises in scope, costs, or timing, and one third fail outright to meet functionality, timing, or cost by large margins"

A very fair point.

The project is only *averagely* bad for IT projects.

I find that a great comfort to me as I contemplate the £12.7 billion of *our* money it has consumed over the last decade or so. Roughly £4.2 bn is solid, another £4.2bn is sort of OK and £4.2 bn is a complete waste.

Perhaps the sheer size of it might have suggested a slightly *better* than average approach would have been a cost effective idea.

And the only known figure for the highly secret IMP was £12bn from the start.

Thank you for the perspective.