Comment: Whitehall's IT blind spot

John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, speaking at the UK government conference on public-private partnerships (PPPs) in London on 16 October, said that the reason he was interested in PPPs was because of the concrete benefits they can bring the people of this country in their day-to-day lives. (He didn't mention the loss of pension rights for transferred workers).

He went on to say that PPPs and private finance initiatives (PFIs) have increased nearly ten-fold in the past seven years and are worth nearly £30bn today. His speech covered the NHS, transport, education and social housing, and mentioned the London Underground, the National Air Traffic Control Service (Nats), the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Docklands Light Railway and Manchester Airport as prime examples. He did not mention any IT projects, and I could have sworn that Nats was in trouble...

At the same conference Peter Gershon, chief executive of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), spoke about IT. He said, "IT projects are part of the broader business environment, they need stakeholder support to succeed, and once again we are back to partnership." He went on to cover the important element of "improving client capability". One of OGC's most recent initiatives is the Successful Delivery Skills programme for civil servants, launched in September by the Cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull.

So I went to the Web site to see what the Successful Delivery Skills programme was all about. And it really is an excellent programme. The Cabinet Office has signed up for training already.

If I listed all the roles and skills areas, you would be asleep before I had finished - but it incorporates all the attributes that innumerable reports have advocated over the past few years, which no one in central government has successfully brought together. These include things like generic skills, business environment, contractual relationships, programme and project delivery, technical skills, and the legal environment.

If all government departments undertake the programme, it will go a long way towards overcoming that old "silo mentality" cliché. One module is about PFIs, one aim of which is to enable participants to understand the similarities and differences between PFI and publicly funded projects and to identify suitable opportunities to recommend the use of PFI.

Within a Successful Delivery Skills Framework, seven project roles are defined: Investment Decision Maker, Programme Manager, Senior Responsible Owner/Project Owner, Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Contract Manager, and Project Team Member. But then something funny happens. Under the heading of Technical Skills, none of them is judged to need more than "awareness" of technical skills. But for Property and Construction the project manager must be an expert. Whatever happened to e-government?

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