The UK Chancellor is expected to massively scale back the world’s largest IT project, in a desperate effort to save money.
picture credit: Mike Rawlins
For the past five years, I have believed that the NPfIT has been the poster child for the Trillion Dollar Bonfire – as a poorly conceived, massively flawed and consequently expensive programme.
Why do I believe that?
Well, notwithstanding that the NHS programme for IT has probably been forecast for a while to run five times over the original cost and take three times longer to deliver, the programme appeared to be handled from the outset simply as just “the world’s biggest IT project.”
But despite the hubris and posturing, there was no visible evidence of a credible systems approach to one of the world’s most complex systems: the National Health Service (NHS).
This was one of the clearest examples ever of an attitude that claimed IT was the solution, long before the challenges were considered – let alone understood.
And yet, billions later and years late, the government now appears ready to sound the death knell for NPfIT.
I have been following this fiasco for five or six years and I don’t expect for one moment that the ‘frustrated’ vendors will walk away empty-handed if Alastair Darling does suspend large chunks of NPfIT in his forthcoming pre-budget statement on December 9th.
There will be poison-pill clauses in the contracts, which means that, once again, the NHS will pay dearly for undelivered value and political naivete.
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Thank you for bringing this serious topic to my attention. I agree with your sentiment but wished you had included two important elements for those of us new to the topic. First, a high level summary of the nature of the project and an assessment of the flaws you tracked would have quickly helped me get up to speed. The statement, “there was no visible evidence of a credible systems approach,” didn’t provide me with much insight. Second, your recommendations as to how it could have been handled better would have been great. I like to understand other people’s thoughts on important considerations for projects such as these.
In summary, I was hoping for a summary with constructive feedback on this very serious topic. As an American, I like to understand the good and bad of projects in other parts of the world to better balance my view. What I experienced was a gripe with a few links to follow. Alas, I must now read more in the links you provided just to understand the situation and make my own conclusions.
Paul
many thanks for your input. I have been commenting on the NPfIT programme (in reality an up-scaled iT project) for many years. This piece was in direct response to the [possibly] outgoing Government initiative to leave a legacy of contract commitments that any successor Government would find difficult/ expensive to unpick.
Of course the programme is worthy of a more detailed analysis but this would require more resource time than this blog can commit.
In the meantime I will continue on my premise of short bursts of thought-provocation.
It is good to see that Colin’s deliberately thought-provoking articles have resulted in contributions from beyond the UK! I for one am keen to see more sharing of ideas internationally.
To be fair to Colin in this instance this is an extremely high profile project in the UK, and regardless of whether you know the project or even agree with the assertions, the key point about genuinely understanding business requirements first is always worth reminding ourselves of. It is all too easy to over simplify at the outset because investment of adequate time and money in properly scoping requirements is a difficult conversation, particular for very large contractor-lead projects that cannot easily be broken up into bite-sized pieces.
I would be interested to hear about your experiences with large projects and whether this more general point also holds true across the Pond.
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