UK National Audit Office on IT Management

The UK National Audit Office have delivered a report on "Delivering successful IT-enabled business change" in which they examine a number of successful IT projects and compare them to the ones that were less successful. I won't comment on how low they set the bar for successful IT projects, nor examine why only two successful UK government project are in the hundred million-pound range and none are in the ten-billion-pound range of the unravelling NHS fiasco. What I will quote is point four of the Executive Summary:

Analysis of our case studies identified three key and recurring themes in successful programmes and projects:

• the level of engagement by senior decision makers of the organisations concerned;
• organisations’ understanding of what they needed to do to be an "intelligent client; and
• their understanding of the importance of determining at the outset what benefits they were aiming to achieve and, importantly, how programmes and projects could be actively managed to ensure these benefits were optimised.

In other words senior managers don't what to think about the projects, aren't willing to talk about how they should work and have no idea of the problems they're trying to solve.

Also covered by the Guardian.

cheers, stuart