I recently went to the Royal Academy of Engineering in London to watch a roundtable discussion. It was at the launch of a joint study with the BCS and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, called Engineering Values in IT.
The premise of the report was to try to move to a situation in the UK where appropriately qualified chartered engineers and chartered IT professionals lead major IT projects both in the public sector and in industry.

A typical comment from the discussion was that to maintain a gas boiler requires a registered person, but the same does not apply to designing a nuclear power station. OK, so that’s an oversimplification, but the point is valid.

It is public sector IT projects that most need targeting by this sort of initiative, especially given that their success rate hovers below 40 per cent. There have been many successful public sector IT projects, but the norm seems to be failure ­
inevitably at huge cost to the taxpayer ­ and it is the high-profile projects that hit the headlines which induce hand wringing and lowered heads.

There were several anecdotes that roundtable members delivered to many chuckles and knowing grins, but unfortunately some of the most cutting and funniest were off the record.

The biggest problem, according to the assembled experts, is that contracts are invariably awarded to the IT supplier that comes in with the lowest-cost bid. One suggestion to stop this happening was that interested suppliers should not be able to bid for the contract until the project was conceived and costed properly.

One roundtable member summed up the situation thus: “There’s an unholy alliance between the suppliers, who want the business and would like to do it on the basis of specifications so ill-thought out that there’s no risk transferred to them.”
Cue general guffaws all round at this point.

“And the people in government letting the contract know perfectly well they won’t be in the same post when those contracts are delivered, and that their careers will be enhanced by being able to place the contract before they move on. They also know that if they budgeted the contracts properly, they would never get funding from the Treasury to go ahead. So both sides ­ customer and supplier ­ are motivated to lie about how much the project will cost and how long it’s going to take. I don’t see how you cut through that.”

The best one-liner of the day? “There will never be any Cabinet responsibility for these contracts, because nobody wants to be the minister for failed public sector IT projects.”

Millions of words have been expended on how to move the success rate for these critical projects closer to 100 per cent rather than being less than 50 per cent. The big question is, would deploying an appropriately qualified chartered IT professional as champion guarantee the project’s success?

One worry expressed at the roundtable was that if, after choosing appropriately qualified professionals, the success rate of public sector IT projects did not improve -­ what then?

Major change is needed here. My solution looks back to mythological times, when the only recorded successful method of removing an equivalent amount of waste was deployed by the legendary Greek hero Heracles ­- or Hercules, if you’re Roman. In his fifth labour, Heracles diverted the Alpheus and Peneus rivers to flush out the Augean stables, washing away years of accumulated filth.

Now there’s a public sector project if ever there was one ­ diverting part of the Thames to flush out the miscreants responsible for wasting vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. Of course, if these same people took on the task, not one drop of the Thames would reach its intended destination.

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