"No one will die if a Public Sector Digital programme goes bang, Right ?" WRONG…

"No one will die if a public sector Digital programme goes bang" WRONG

Dragon ERP helps S151 officers and public sector leadership teams safeguard their investment in Digital. (Solution assurance, delivery assurance and programme turnaround)

With so many eyes on Birmingham City Council and other notable UK public sector ERP / Digital transformation programme failures, we would like to add further context to the debate, why is failure the unacceptable norm!

Dragon audits and recovers failing public sector programmes, and we have multiple examples of why complex transformation fails.

(Breaking news over 80% of AI programmes have failed to achieve their required outcomes, and the public sector is already rushing headlong into AI).

The most striking and often occurring failure point being a culture of poor governance. Which is surprising when you consider that most public sector bodies invest in crafting an agnostic project and programme management methodology to deliver all capital programmes, including Digital.

But an underinvestment in people leads to a tick box governance template culture whereby all the governance products are completed and boards set up, but the content is very poor quality!

A simple question to any SRO (Senior Responsible Officer) would be, do you understand your roles and responsibilities together the level of effort required to perform the SRO role? often the answer is NO

or Have the impacted service lines leaders signed up to and own the expected outcomes, benefits, will empower the undertaking and stand up and backfill the right SMEs ? again NO

And most glaringly scope, detailed opex and capex finance plan, required outcomes, change impact and associated benefits seldom defined in detail with little service leadership sponsorship.

And then there is the need to be special ! there is operating model commonality across all layers of govt, but the public sector simply will no accept this…. as a rule of thumb all County Councils deliver the same services, central govt departments GL accounting and FP&A, with all County Constabulary's being similar.

A well governed programme should be able to define its outcomes based on its current operating model (as-is) and future state (to-be) and then calibrate the means and cost of delivery.

All too often the public sector will focus on a digital solution fixing a business problem without checking business alignment to the solution (the all important fit)

Here are some real examples of ridiculously crazy public sector digital that we have seen put people at risk:

Digital programme for a County Council close to issuing a s114 notice (insolvent), 4 years late, a £6m wasted investment hidden from the members, a wider lack of funding led to children care homes forced to close.

Digital children's social care programme, went live without its case management system so social workers lost site of children at risk.

Digital Adult social care system programme, didn't migrate case files or test reporting system, again social workers left blind.

Digital Housing management system, selected software that didn't have a housing management module and required the software vendor to write one ! never went live, investment wasted

Cloud migration programme for 200 applications, no upfront discovery leading to a large number of failed migrations, the County Council had to invoke its Business Continuity Plan.

And my favourite being two large County Councils seeking to migrate to one enterprise class HCM solution and Payroll system on the cloud, Penetration Tests identified it wasn’t on the G Cloud and was not allowed to go live, costing millions to resolve.

If your worried that your Digital transformation portfolio is out of control, then contact Dragon.
We offer a comprehensive Programme and Solution assurance service, that can help leaders fully understand the current level of risk and means of mitigation.