This article relates to a major government IT Project where the objective was to give staff web access to amalgamate information from different systems, understand the situation and make decisions remotely when facing clients in the front line
A small IT company was contracted to provide document management solutions to one of the bigger sub contractors involved with this Project. The document management solution provided used servers at three locations providing access with full version control of all documents. This system worked reasonably well within the limits of the IT infrastructure available and supported the Project Team over a number of years.
The Project used the PRINCE methodology, with the document system holding all the various elements of the specification and approaches to be used. After a few months it became clear that a number of intractable problems were slowing progress to a crawl, the process itself was not converging but was clearly oscillating, when looking at the version control of the documents this effect was clearly in evidence. This carried on for a number of years where many hundreds of millions of pounds were spent, until the Project was finally halted.
Before a Project is implemented, small, or in this case very large, it is crucial that a very clear value and feasibility assessment is conducted at a strategic level, openly and honestly with integrity. Where there are unanswered questions then small scale pilots must be completed to genuinely assess the feasibility. If this is not done then the above situation will occur, unless it is one of a very small number of Projects that get lucky.