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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-much-for-project-management dept.

A UK government report (board minutes from the Health & Social Care Information Centre) says that the National Health Service has £5 billion worth of Information Technology projects at high risk of failure:

The ratings are based on gateway reports assessing the risk of four IT projects this year. All are related as "red" or "amber/red" meaning successful delivery is either impossible or extremely unlikely. Those projects include the remaining electronic health records contracts with BT and CSC, due to end in 2015 and 2016.

According to the HSCIC report, the £2.3bn CSC Local Service Provider (LSP) programme has now been flagged as "red", up from "amber/red" when the Major Projects Authority last released its rating for September 2014. Both programmes were originally started in 2003/2004 and have had an extremely troubled history.

Other high-rated projects on the list included the £168m NHSmail2 programme, to provide secure email across the NHS, which has slipped from "amber" to "amber/red".

NHSmail2 is an upgrade to the NHS's Microsoft Exchange based email system. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and BT Health London have managed IT services for different divisions of England (CSC manages the North, Midlands & Eastern cluster, BT manages the London cluster).

Previously: UK National Health Service Dumps Oracle For FOSS NoSQL


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:58AM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @06:58AM (#273838) Journal

    Consultants overspec, overprice, underdeliver but get their lawyers to write the contracts.

    Heh, another Brit thinking its all special in the UK.

    Big government just about ALWAYS gets it wrong. All around the world.

    Remember Obama having to call in Google, and Oracle, and every body else to bail out Obamacare?

    The bigger the contract the higher propensity to fail. The rule of 5s: Any project involving more than 5 companies, or 5 million dollars, or 5 years, has a one in 500 chance of being completed AT ALL, let along on time, one in 5000 chance of being on budget.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:08AM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @08:08AM (#273848)

    No kidding. He may as well have been describing the Pentagon instead of the NHS. $10,000 hammers, $50.00 band aids, $1,000 toilet seats, as the sayings go. If you want to get really rich in the U.S on the taxpayers tits, go into the military industrial complex. Their budget isn't anywhere near 5bn pounds. We wish. More like 2,0000 times that in the last 10 years alone.

    Comparable fuckups are quite easily found around here :)

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @09:27AM (#273865)

    The bigger the contract the higher propensity to fail. The rule of 5s: Any project involving more than 5 companies, or 5 million dollars, or 5 years, has a one in 500 chance of being completed AT ALL, let along on time, one in 5000 chance of being on budget.

    Wasn't like that before e.g. Manhattan Project, Apollo program. And plenty of other successful military aircraft were built too (Harrier, Lightning, Panavia Tornado, F14, F15, F16, A10, Apache, Lynx). Same goes for many other stuff like ships and submarines.

    Perhaps the parasite load is too high nowadays: http://despair.com/products/consulting [despair.com]

    The solution is getting rid of the parasites and the people who keep adding them in.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:29PM

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:29PM (#274022) Journal

      And plenty of other successful military aircraft were built too (Harrier, Lightning, Panavia Tornado, F14, F15, F16, A10, Apache, Lynx). Same goes for many other stuff like ships and submarines.

      No.
      You name a bunch of successful projects, to suggest that large scale failed IT projects have always been with us.

      Yet IT has not always been with us.

      And IT systems seem particularly prone [computerworld.com] to monumental spending over runs yet in the end being scrapped totally, because they could never be completed.

      http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=1445 [calleam.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:11PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:11PM (#274072) Journal

    Remember Obama having to call in Google, and Oracle, and every body else to bail out Obamacare?
     
      No, I don't remember Oracle bailing out the system built by Oracle. [latimes.com]