NRPP, On Time and On Budget
04 May 2016As Vaughn Palmer said last week,
“Another day, another bogus claim from the B.C. Liberals that a major capital project is on time and on budget.”
We in the IT consulting field are perhaps numb to the eternal cycle of cutting scope, pushing the delivery date, and declaring victory, but in the cut-throat world of politics, these things have consequences.
At the very least, you’ll be publicly mocked when you do it, as on Tuesday the NDP mocked the Liberals for repeated non-delivery of an online Civil Resolution Tribunal.
Mind you, most of these wounds are self-inflicted, as this government just will not let go of the core principles of enterprise IT failure:
- make the budget as large as possible;
- make the scope as broad as possible; and,
- hire international IT consultancies so large that they don’t care whether your project succeeds or not, just so long as they can bill out as much as possible.
These are the guiding principles that have brought them ICM, MyEdBC, Panorama, and enough other miscues that the Vancouver Sun felt compelled to run a whole series of articles on IT failure.
And there’s another one in progress!
The $57.2 million Natural Resource Permitting Project (NRPP) Phase One is now at least a year behind schedule, based on a business plan document that was quietly placed online this March.
This is the same NRPP business plan I requested via FOI in 2014, and was given 200 blank pages of PDF in reply. The plan released March 2016 still has all the dollar figures blanked out. That’s right, they released a “business plan” without the numbers!
According to the “Investment Roadmap” year one of the project, fiscal 2014/15 which ended 12 months ago, should have delivered the following results:
- New legislative framework in place
- High-priority business processes re-engineered
- Initial foundational integrated spatial-temporal operational database available
- IM/IT and priority finance operating model and processes re-engineered
- New Common Client architecture available
- Transformation governance model in place
Has any of this happened?
The project capital plan, written last fall, lists similar capabilities as items to be delivered in the future.
According to the business plan, on the basis of which $57M capital dollars were committed in 2014, the project is now at least a year behind.
As we can see from the discrepency between the older business plan and the capital plan, the usual process has begun: the goal posts are on the move. Next up, the bogus claims.
Fortunately, the international consultants are billing hard so we’ll be back on schedule shortly. In the end everything will be delivered “on time, and on budget”, I guarantee it.