But the lack of experience of senior responsible owners (SROs) and the failure of advising bodies to support them could result in a project failing, the Commons public accounts committee said on Tuesday.
Committee chairman Edward Leigh said: "Not all major government IT projects end up on the rocks: as the successful Payment Modernisation Programme and Pension Credit have shown.
"If more large IT projects are to be similarly successful, then departments will have to understand what was done to make things go right."
MPs spoke to officials from the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the Cabinet Office about the government's transformational agenda of designing public services around the 'client' rather than the provider.
Departments are spending an estimated £12-14bn a year on more than 100 new and existing IT programmes, but the committee warned that department boards and other supporting bodies, such as the OGC, needed to keep a closer eye on progress.
"The risks are high and, given a history of past failures, government departments need the structures and management processes to secure greater success in IT-enabled programmes and projects," the report said.
Supporting project managers
At the moment individual departments are assisted by a number of internal and outside mechanisms.
The Cabinet Office's delivery and transformation group (formerly the E-government Unit) produces IT strategy and policy, promotes best practice and carries out capability reviews, while the OGC helps departments improve efficiency and project delivery, get better value from suppliers, and runs the gateway review process.
In the future the Treasury will also provide scrutiny of the process leading to contract awards, through its 'major projects review group'.
The committee report noted: "With this division of responsibilities across Whitehall, it is important that roles are clear and activities co-ordinated."
The MPs looked at 120 high-risk or "mission critical" projects and found that many SROs were inexperienced and not getting adequate support from within their own departments.
Inexperienced and isolated
Some 21 per cent of SROs had not met the nominated minister and another 28 per cent had met them less than once in three months.
More than half of them were in their first SRO role, with a similar number spending only 20 per cent of their time on SRO duties, and heads of excellence centres told MPs they were concerned about the lack of project and programme management skills.
But, despite their concern, nearly 40 per cent of SROs had no involvement with centres of excellence and the committee said the support roles of the centres and chief information officers needed to be clarified by the OGC and the Cabinet Office.
There was also confusion about the routes to improve skills and MPs criticised the OGC's system of gateway reviews because the results were not being shared widely enough.
Only three quarters of centres of excellence received the reviews and nearly half of audit commissions within departments were not being briefed on the outcome.
MPs also found that not enough IT projects were making it to the fifth and final review which judges a project's outcome against the expected benefits.
Leigh said: "The government has put in place a number of high-level initiatives to make departments raise their game. But to get real purchase those initiatives must be co-ordinated with one another."
Quelle/Source: ePolitix, 05.06.2007
