Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer

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Reliable Project Delivery

Reliable Project Delivery was introduced in 2005/06 to increase the certainty of delivering successful Government IT-enabled business change projects. At organisational and cross-government level, the Cabinet Office woks closely with the Office of Government Commerce to identify successful approaches to project delivery, and actively embeds them across the public sector.

Aims

We will identify major programmes and projects that have a high complexity and associated high delivery risk, and will take a greater role in managing them and overseeing progress. A more structured approach to skills matching, reporting and management of portfolios will be a key enabler for consistent high delivery of public sector programmes and projects.

Key Achievements

• In January 2007, the Cabinet Office introduced a new process of reporting on ICT-enabled Business Change programmes to the PSX(e) Ministerial Committee.  The Pan-Government Portfolio aimed to present ministers with a simple “dashboard” view of the major programmes, showing the state of health of the IT portfolio as a whole. Since March 2007, the Portfolio has been reported quarterly and evolved into the single central Major Programme and Project (MPP) Portfolio – facilitated jointly by Office of Government Commerce and the Cabinet Office.  
• By the end of the financial year 2008/09 more than 30 central government departments were using portfolio management to manage their IT-enabled business change portfolios.
  • A guide to Departmental Portfolio Management was produced jointly by the Office of Government Commerce and the Cabinet Office in December 2008, the first time the two organisations had worked together in this way.

Benefits

• All organisations across the public sector will use proven techniques to ensure that they initiate appropriate projects in the first place and identify and resolve generic, cross-organisational and project specific issues impacting delivery.
• Robust control and governance in all public sector organisations so that their projects are challenged throughout their lifecycles and those that fail the challenge are halted and, depending on the reasons, either fixed or stopped.
• Active cost and benefit management in all public sector organisations so that they can articulate the full cost and benefit of their complete ICT-enabled change agendas and that those benefits are locked into settlements, accountability for delivery is assigned and accepted, and there is continuous assurance and challenge that they are being harvested as planned.

How does the public sector compare to the private sector in delivering successful IT-enabled business change projects?

A published research shows that the failure rate of our projects is no greater than the private sector.  Defining ‘success’ or ‘failure’ can be difficult as complex projects may legitimately run over time and budget due to agreed increase in a project’s scope and requirements. Although figures for success and failure are comparable, there are some key differences between projects in the public sector and private sector such as the scale and complexity, accessibility and universality considerations, higher visibility to the public and media and likelihood of unforeseen policy changes effecting the scope of the projects.

There are very few instances of “technical” failure, the majority of our problems are with the business change aspects of IT related projects and much of our work is focussed on improving those areas. 

• Reliable Project Delivery (ICT Strategy) [PDF]

Contact 
For further information email rpd@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk