Scott’s Flawed Expeditions in IT Land
Interviewer: How will you meet the challenge?
Jim Hacker: It's far too early to give detailed proposals.
(Yes Minister)
I was thinking of Scott Wickenden’s namesake, Captain Scott of the Antarctic, whose expeditions into that realm were, despite the hype, an unqualified failure. Something similar seems to be the case with our Scott with relation to the States and its IT projects.
Scott and the EGov saga: The first attempt to reach the South Pole
This starts around June 2016, when a press release from Ian Gorst on behalf of the Government noted that:
Interviewer: How will you meet the challenge?
Jim Hacker: It's far too early to give detailed proposals.
(Yes Minister)
I was thinking of Scott Wickenden’s namesake, Captain Scott of the Antarctic, whose expeditions into that realm were, despite the hype, an unqualified failure. Something similar seems to be the case with our Scott with relation to the States and its IT projects.
Scott and the EGov saga: The first attempt to reach the South Pole
This starts around June 2016, when a press release from Ian Gorst on behalf of the Government noted that:
“Deputy Wickenden’s 15 years’ experience in tech services prior to his election to the States, means he’s uniquely qualified for this new role and I look forward to working with him.”
This is to do with Deputy Scott Wickenden being appointed Assistant Minister with specific responsibility for eGov. We were told that “The Chief Minister, Senator Ian Gorst, has made the appointment to further strengthen the eGov programme.”
At the time, an audit published earlier by the Comptroller and Auditor General (19 May 2016), said “eGov is not easy. It is about so much more than technology and touches fundamentally on how government interacts externally with citizens and internally between functions and activities. Successful implementation goes beyond systems and processes to vision, culture and skills.”
Deputy Wickenden said “I’m delighted to have been appointed to this role. eGov is about transforming government for the benefit of Islanders, and it’s a critical component of Public Sector Reform. There have already been significant improvements to project and risk management; and I look forward to working on the development and implementation of eGov across the organisation.”
Chief Minister, Senator Ian Gorst and Treasury Minister Senator Alan Maclean added the following joint statement “The creation of a dedicated eGov ministerial appointment sends a clear message about this government’s determination to deliver on eGov.”
Fast forward to February 2020, and Bailiwick Express reports that:
“The Assistant Chief Minister has admitted that serious failings within the fruitless £11.6m eGov project are ‘lessons learned’, as the government launches a fresh attempt to modernise civil service IT systems.
By this time it was acknowledged that the government had failed to deliver on eGov, and whatever work Deputy Wickenden had done on “the development and implementation of eGov” was a failure.
You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down: Scott’s Second Exhibition sets off
Not cowed by the failure of eGov, over which he presided, a new IT project began, with a projected budget of £28million project.
Bailiwick Express noted that this which “aims to achieve many of the ambitions that eGov failed to realise – Deputy Scott Wickenden has said the government had taken away many insights from its last attempt to bring different departments' IT systems together.”
“The resurrected £28million project will see an IT procurement specialist, DMW Group, source specialist technology providers to entirely update the way Government works online. The vision is to do away with outdated systems and ways of working to replace it with “tried and tested” services, which will be installed across departments to join up the finance, payroll and recruitment systems.”
Speaking to Express, Deputy Wickenden, who also took a major role in the eGov project, shed some light on what went wrong with the former project - which went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the Chamber of Commerce as a lesson in "how not to run a project" - that overspent and underachieved: “I think there’s a lot of lessons learned from the eGov.
"One was about making sure that we’ve got the right oversight above the organisation and the right authority. So in the eGov programme, there was a lot of ‘scope creep’ a lot of the then departments of the old days would be trying to push programmes onto the eGov programme and then they would continue changing what they wanted throughout the programme. So it wasn’t scoped properly. Then there was no authority within that area to say ‘no we’re doing it this way’.
In March 2021, Bailiwick Xpress reported on more details of the project:
More details are set to be announced this afternoon on the Government’s long-awaited £28m project to ‘join up’ all of its IT systems.
The Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) was launched last February, to deliver the key ambition of the former ‘eGov’ project: to do away with decades-old systems and bring together different departments’ finance, payroll and recruitment platforms, among many others, to make the Government as a whole more efficient, and easier for islanders to work with.
The £9.9m eGov project went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the island’s main business lobby group, the Chamber of Commerce, as a lesson in “how not to run a programme” due to its “adhoc” project expenditure and apparently ill-defined lines of accountability.
In launching its revitalised ‘ITS’ plan last year, having signed a contract with DMW group to source specialist technology providers to update the way Government works, Assistant Minister Deputy Scott Wickenden promised that there were many “lessons learned” from eGov.
Scott’s Lessons learned in how to fail successfully
Later in 2021, Bailiwick Express again returned to look at the project, with more figures forthcoming. As with eGov, budgets have increased considerably:
“The Government has been forced to defend its £63m IT programme - whose cost has more than doubled since it was announced last year - against accusations of poor project management. After revealing details of its ‘Integrated Technology Solution’, with the naming of Deloitte subsidiary Keytree as the programme’s lead partner, officials were grilled by Scrutiny yesterday over how the project could be seen as "good value for the public."
“The five-year project will cost £63m - a figure more than twice the £28m initial estimate. This was because, the Government said earlier this week, it had significantly under-estimated the cost and scope of the project, which will integrate finance, payroll and procurement systems.”
“In particular, the Government conceded that it had over-estimated the ability of existing departments to staff the programme. It said much of the extra cost would be spent on backfilling existing jobs or employing more people to join the project.”
Scott hasn’t quite reached the Antarctic but is still trying!
October 2021 saw yet another report on the project, this time from the Government Auditor-General’s report, and it was as damming as the last one:
“The costs of the island’s largest ever IT project ballooned to nearly £70m in a single year while its predicted annual savings significantly dropped because the Government didn’t budget for it properly, a spending watchdog has concluded.”
“Launched in early 2020, the Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) programme, which aimed to update the civil service’s outdated finance, HR and other systems and combine them in a single modern platform, was first predicted to cost around £28m. But earlier this year the Government was forced to defend itself against accusations of poor project management when it emerged that costs had risen by 125% in around just 12 months. “
“A report by Comptroller and Auditor General Lynn Pamment has today concluded that the issue was due to poor budgeting, with the Government’s processes for identifying and calculating costs blasted as “not sufficiently robust”. She said the Government was “overly optimistic” when it put together its plan for the ITS in September 2019 – including about the ability of existing departments to staff the programme at no extra cost.
By the time the full business case was published in March 2021, the overall programme cost had risen from £28m – the amount budgeted in the Government Plan 2020-2023 – to £67.8m.
While acknowledging that the pandemic “had an impact on assumptions and costs”, Ms Pamment said the Government still should have been able to identify many of these at the project’s outset. She also said contingency funding should have been factored in at this early stage.
Scott is still searching for that elusive South Pole
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.' (Oscar Wilde)
Most mere mortals would be rather subdued in their response to what is in incredibly damming report on the IT project. Not so Deputy Wickenden, who managed to see the silver lining through the gathering storm clouds of the faltering second IT programme that he has been overseeing:
"Deputy Scott Wickenden, who has Ministerial responsibility for the Programme, said the Government welcomed the report and thanked the Comptroller and Auditor General for her "thorough review"."
"Overall, the review is a positive endorsement of how the Programme was set-up and the procurement process that was undertaken," he said.
“The review includes a number of recommendations, the majority of which are underway or have already been implemented. It acknowledges that the procurement for the ITS Programme was well conducted and that a good governance structure is in place.
"It also highlights a number of challenges to its implementation, including the capacity of Government colleagues to engage fully with the Programme in order for timely decisions to be made."
Final Thoughts: A Doomed Quest? At what cost?
This is to do with Deputy Scott Wickenden being appointed Assistant Minister with specific responsibility for eGov. We were told that “The Chief Minister, Senator Ian Gorst, has made the appointment to further strengthen the eGov programme.”
At the time, an audit published earlier by the Comptroller and Auditor General (19 May 2016), said “eGov is not easy. It is about so much more than technology and touches fundamentally on how government interacts externally with citizens and internally between functions and activities. Successful implementation goes beyond systems and processes to vision, culture and skills.”
Deputy Wickenden said “I’m delighted to have been appointed to this role. eGov is about transforming government for the benefit of Islanders, and it’s a critical component of Public Sector Reform. There have already been significant improvements to project and risk management; and I look forward to working on the development and implementation of eGov across the organisation.”
Chief Minister, Senator Ian Gorst and Treasury Minister Senator Alan Maclean added the following joint statement “The creation of a dedicated eGov ministerial appointment sends a clear message about this government’s determination to deliver on eGov.”
Fast forward to February 2020, and Bailiwick Express reports that:
“The Assistant Chief Minister has admitted that serious failings within the fruitless £11.6m eGov project are ‘lessons learned’, as the government launches a fresh attempt to modernise civil service IT systems.
By this time it was acknowledged that the government had failed to deliver on eGov, and whatever work Deputy Wickenden had done on “the development and implementation of eGov” was a failure.
You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down: Scott’s Second Exhibition sets off
Not cowed by the failure of eGov, over which he presided, a new IT project began, with a projected budget of £28million project.
Bailiwick Express noted that this which “aims to achieve many of the ambitions that eGov failed to realise – Deputy Scott Wickenden has said the government had taken away many insights from its last attempt to bring different departments' IT systems together.”
“The resurrected £28million project will see an IT procurement specialist, DMW Group, source specialist technology providers to entirely update the way Government works online. The vision is to do away with outdated systems and ways of working to replace it with “tried and tested” services, which will be installed across departments to join up the finance, payroll and recruitment systems.”
Speaking to Express, Deputy Wickenden, who also took a major role in the eGov project, shed some light on what went wrong with the former project - which went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the Chamber of Commerce as a lesson in "how not to run a project" - that overspent and underachieved: “I think there’s a lot of lessons learned from the eGov.
"One was about making sure that we’ve got the right oversight above the organisation and the right authority. So in the eGov programme, there was a lot of ‘scope creep’ a lot of the then departments of the old days would be trying to push programmes onto the eGov programme and then they would continue changing what they wanted throughout the programme. So it wasn’t scoped properly. Then there was no authority within that area to say ‘no we’re doing it this way’.
In March 2021, Bailiwick Xpress reported on more details of the project:
More details are set to be announced this afternoon on the Government’s long-awaited £28m project to ‘join up’ all of its IT systems.
The Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) was launched last February, to deliver the key ambition of the former ‘eGov’ project: to do away with decades-old systems and bring together different departments’ finance, payroll and recruitment platforms, among many others, to make the Government as a whole more efficient, and easier for islanders to work with.
The £9.9m eGov project went around £2m over budget, and was slammed by the island’s main business lobby group, the Chamber of Commerce, as a lesson in “how not to run a programme” due to its “adhoc” project expenditure and apparently ill-defined lines of accountability.
In launching its revitalised ‘ITS’ plan last year, having signed a contract with DMW group to source specialist technology providers to update the way Government works, Assistant Minister Deputy Scott Wickenden promised that there were many “lessons learned” from eGov.
Scott’s Lessons learned in how to fail successfully
Later in 2021, Bailiwick Express again returned to look at the project, with more figures forthcoming. As with eGov, budgets have increased considerably:
“The Government has been forced to defend its £63m IT programme - whose cost has more than doubled since it was announced last year - against accusations of poor project management. After revealing details of its ‘Integrated Technology Solution’, with the naming of Deloitte subsidiary Keytree as the programme’s lead partner, officials were grilled by Scrutiny yesterday over how the project could be seen as "good value for the public."
“The five-year project will cost £63m - a figure more than twice the £28m initial estimate. This was because, the Government said earlier this week, it had significantly under-estimated the cost and scope of the project, which will integrate finance, payroll and procurement systems.”
“In particular, the Government conceded that it had over-estimated the ability of existing departments to staff the programme. It said much of the extra cost would be spent on backfilling existing jobs or employing more people to join the project.”
Scott hasn’t quite reached the Antarctic but is still trying!
October 2021 saw yet another report on the project, this time from the Government Auditor-General’s report, and it was as damming as the last one:
“The costs of the island’s largest ever IT project ballooned to nearly £70m in a single year while its predicted annual savings significantly dropped because the Government didn’t budget for it properly, a spending watchdog has concluded.”
“Launched in early 2020, the Integrated Technology Solution (ITS) programme, which aimed to update the civil service’s outdated finance, HR and other systems and combine them in a single modern platform, was first predicted to cost around £28m. But earlier this year the Government was forced to defend itself against accusations of poor project management when it emerged that costs had risen by 125% in around just 12 months. “
“A report by Comptroller and Auditor General Lynn Pamment has today concluded that the issue was due to poor budgeting, with the Government’s processes for identifying and calculating costs blasted as “not sufficiently robust”. She said the Government was “overly optimistic” when it put together its plan for the ITS in September 2019 – including about the ability of existing departments to staff the programme at no extra cost.
By the time the full business case was published in March 2021, the overall programme cost had risen from £28m – the amount budgeted in the Government Plan 2020-2023 – to £67.8m.
While acknowledging that the pandemic “had an impact on assumptions and costs”, Ms Pamment said the Government still should have been able to identify many of these at the project’s outset. She also said contingency funding should have been factored in at this early stage.
Scott is still searching for that elusive South Pole
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.' (Oscar Wilde)
Most mere mortals would be rather subdued in their response to what is in incredibly damming report on the IT project. Not so Deputy Wickenden, who managed to see the silver lining through the gathering storm clouds of the faltering second IT programme that he has been overseeing:
"Deputy Scott Wickenden, who has Ministerial responsibility for the Programme, said the Government welcomed the report and thanked the Comptroller and Auditor General for her "thorough review"."
"Overall, the review is a positive endorsement of how the Programme was set-up and the procurement process that was undertaken," he said.
“The review includes a number of recommendations, the majority of which are underway or have already been implemented. It acknowledges that the procurement for the ITS Programme was well conducted and that a good governance structure is in place.
"It also highlights a number of challenges to its implementation, including the capacity of Government colleagues to engage fully with the Programme in order for timely decisions to be made."
Final Thoughts: A Doomed Quest? At what cost?
With such an soaring costs, no wonder there is no money for education! It's not digging up roads which is the issue so much as digging a very large black IT hole which has to be filled, and Deputy Wickenden is in charge of both!
As money has been sucked into the IT project, it is hardly surprising that there is so little available for schools.
References
https://www.gov.je/News/2016/pages/NewAssistantMinisterEgov.aspx
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/lessons-learned-egov-inform-28m-it-strategy/#.YXHqOhrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/details-emerge-about-govs-long-awaited-28m-tech-plan/#.YXHskxrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/government-criticised-125-cost-rise-major-it-project/#.YXHqVxrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/watchdog-says-budget-major-it-project-wasnt-sufficiently-robust/#.YXHpnxrMLIU
https://www.gov.je/News/2016/pages/NewAssistantMinisterEgov.aspx
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/lessons-learned-egov-inform-28m-it-strategy/#.YXHqOhrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/details-emerge-about-govs-long-awaited-28m-tech-plan/#.YXHskxrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/government-criticised-125-cost-rise-major-it-project/#.YXHqVxrMLIU
https://www.bailiwickexpress.com/jsy/news/watchdog-says-budget-major-it-project-wasnt-sufficiently-robust/#.YXHpnxrMLIU
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