Published on the 04/07/2017 | Written by Jonathan Cotton

Cancer registry marks yet another government IT misstep…

Officials at the Department of Health have been slammed following a scathing audit by the Australian National Audit Office into Australia’s disastrous cancer registry, finding the project bogged down by cost overruns, delays and identifying multiple conflicts of interest.

In other words, business as usual.

According to the report the, the “objectives sought by the Government have not been achieved in the agreed timeframe and additional costs have been incurred as a result.”

In 2016 the registry was projected to cost $180 million, but the report puts the current figure at $220 million.

The register, along with a new cervical cancer screening test, was scheduled to be operational May 1, but now won’t be available until December, requiring at least $16m in taxpayer topups to continue cervical screenings in the interim.

Auditors found five officers who failed to declare a past or current working relationship with Telstra and where conflicts were declared, these weren’t properly recorded. Auditors also discovered that nine officers held shares in Telstra at the time of the procurement.

Whether their subsequent behaviours added to or took away from the prevailing Telstra share price wasn’t considered by the ANAO.

“The integrity of the procurement was weakened by health staff acting inconsistently with the probity arrangements,” the report said.

“The full extent of the project’s complexity, risk and the potential consequences of project failure or delay were not communicated to the government at the point in time the funds were allocated.

“The objectives sought by the government have not been achieved in the agreed timeframe and additional costs have been incurred as a result.”

Telstra was awarded the $220 million contract in May last year, despite Telstra never having run a similar project and a viable not-for-profit with experience and infrastructure being overlooked.

As of March this year, just two deliverables have been accepted on the project, with two more provisionally accepted. Under the contract, 37 deliverables were due.

By the start of 2017 it was clear things were going pear-shaped, with multiple key milestones missed.

“[T]he start date for Australia’s first National Cancer Screening Register has been delayed”, a statement said at the time.

“Without a register function, there will be no national system in place to provide screening histories to laboratories to inform clinical decision-making and no safety net supporting women with positive test results to get the follow-up they need”.

It’s just one of several high profile major IT failures the federal government has experienced in recent years.

A 2011 report by the Victorian Ombudsman looked into high-profile IT projects which had failed, including the $360 million HealthSMART modernisation and the bungled $1.5b Myki public transport ticketing system, along with eight others.

“The consensus is that these projects are often poorly managed and failures are common,” that report reads.

“[I]n our respective roles as Auditor-General and Ombudsman, we have tabled in Parliament a number of reports relating to ICT-enabled projects. These reports have identified significant shortcomings in the public sector’s management of such projects and have included numerous recommendations about how such management can be improved.”

“Despite these reports, we see little sign of lessons learnt in the public sector. The evidence to date is that the public sector is not managing ICT-enabled projects effectively, as demonstrated by the current difficulties that Victoria is facing in this area and the increasingly adverse public comment about major ICT-enabled projects.”

It seems nothing much has changed since. More recently, the Australian Taxation Office’s $880 million technological upgrade ran late and was over budget, and the $1.2b Queensland Health payroll debacle has recently been resolved with the Queensland government ordered to pay “significant costs” to tech giant IBM Australia.

That fracas led to the development of an updated standard for IT governance by the Standards Australia Technical Committee, a report which unambiguously placed the blame for large-scale IT failures squarely at the feet of boards and senior staff.

“The standard was prepared due to continuing failures of major IT projects to deliver expected value. The aim was to bring home the need for action from boards and senior business executives who are responsible for the overall governance of the organisation,” said the Standards Australia chief executive, Dr Bronwyn Evans at the time.

“If organisations want to obtain maximum value from their investment, governance of IT projects should not be left to the IT department alone.”

It’s a problem breathtaking in both scale and scope. One calculation puts the global cost of IT project failure at US$6.2 trillion per annum, with an estimated 15 percent of projects abandoned pre-launch or shortly afterwards. The Standish Group, in analysing a decade of US IT projects with $10 million or more in labour costs, found that just 6.4 percent were successful.

Another report offers even starker figures, with 25 percent of technology projects failing outright, 20 to 25 percent not showing any return on investment and up to 50 percent needing reworking by the time they’re finished.

The big question is of course, how do government rates of IT project failure compare to the private sector?

That’s hard to answer definitively, but according to a report from the Standish Group, from 2003 to 2012, just 6.4 percent of US IT projects with $10 million or more in labor costs were successful.

So why do these big projects fail?

According to project management best practice outfit Axelos (home of PRINCE2 among others), the most common reasons for IT project failure include:

• Lack of clear links between the project and the organisation’s key strategic priorities (including agreed measures of success)
• Lack of clear senior management and ministerial ownership and leadership
• Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders
• Lack of skills and a proven approach to project management and risk management
• Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps
• Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long term value for money (especially securing delivery of business benefits)
• Lack of understanding of, and contact with, the supply industry at senior levels in the organisation
• Lack of effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain

(Read the full Addressing project failure through PRINCE2 report here.)