Tag Archives: Cabinet Office

Cabinet Office’s chief projects troubleshooter – a good choice

Posted on 07/04/2011 | 3 comments

David Pitchford, who has been Executive Director of Major Projects within the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group, is to run the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority which has the power to intervene in failing projects.

Last year Pitchford delivered what Lindsay Scott, co-director of Arras People, called an “amazingly frank assessment of the state of major projects within the UK Government”.

Pitchford said failures of government projects were because of:

– Political pressure
– No business case
– No agreed budget
– 80% of projects launched before 1,2 & 3 have been resolved
– Sole solution approach (options not considered)
– Lack of Commercial capability  – (contract / administration)
– No plan
– No timescale
– No defined benefits

The new Major Projects Authority is run as a partnership with the Treasury and approves projects worth more than £5m.  The Guardian reports that the Authority has an enforceable mandate from the prime minister to oversee and direct the management of all large scale central government projects.

It will be able to:

– tell departments if there is a need for additional assurance

– arrange extra support for a project

– take disputes or problems to ministers.

Departments will be required to provide an integrated assurance and approval plan for every project at its inception. The MPA will approve these before the Cabinet Office and Treasury approves projects, and run an assurance process at key stages to assess whether they are on course to deliver on time, within budget and to the required quality.

It will also compile a portfolio of major projects, reporting on them once a year, and work with departments to improve their skills in the management of projects and programmes.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said the Authority is being set up to improve government’s poor record on project delivery.

“The MPA will work in collaboration with central government departments to help us get firmer control of our major projects both at an individual and portfolio level,” he said. “It will look at projects from High Speed Two (for London to Scotland rail services) to the Rural Payments Agency’s ICT system.”

Comment:

Pitchford’s increasing influence on major projects within the Cabinet Office is welcome, especially after the departures of some other reformers who include John Suffolk and Andy Tait.

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Report says Maude to unveil incubator fund for mutuals

Posted on 04/04/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

According to a report in the Independent yesterday, the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, will today unveil new services, including an incubator fund, to help thousands of public-sector workers take over government services via mutuals.

Maude has reportedly appointed Stephen Kelly, the former head of Micro Focus, to be the Crown Commercial Representative to head up the creation of the mutuals from existing teams within central government departments. Kelly, who has  advised government on IT projects, will lead the work to ensure the  mutuals are set up to attract the right commercial partners – and to  acquire appropriate funding so they can become successful stand-alone businesses delivering public services.

The Cabinet Office is also set to establish an enterprise incubator to help civil servants create successful enterprises from within government, allowing employee and management teams to form mutual companies under the Right to Provide, which has already been announced. The teams will be able to access expertise and finance from a private-sector partner in a joint venture.

The Independent also reported that Maude is setting up a mutuals programme team to work with government departments to support the new mutuals and to ensure that public services continue.

Potentially, thousands of public-sector employees will be given a significant stake in these organisations, plus the chance to shape the way services are delivered, and also how they are run and how to reward themselves.

Maude’s announcement, if it is made today, will keep up the momentum on mutualisation. With no significant announcement in the Budget, and reports that the planned Public Services White Paper had been put back to May, there were some indications that mutualisation progress had slowed down or stalled.

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Mutuals do things differently, unshackled by rules – Francis Maude

Posted on 17/03/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has asked MPs to visit public sector sites that have created co-operatives to see how they have changed their ways of working.

He told a committee of MPs:

“I can point you to some fantastic ones where people are just thinking in sometimes tiny ways, ways of doing things differently, that deliver a better service for less money because they have thought about it.

“And they are not subject to some hierarchy and some set of rules that prevents them doing it. They just do it.”

Ian Watmore, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, told the same hearing of the Public Administration Select Committee, that he and his colleagues will be publishing a White Paper on proposed reforms. 

“I believe mutualisation will be a big part of that and it will enable the Government to deliver on the reforms that it has already set out and it will trigger new reforms as people come up with more innovative ideas at the front line,” said Watmore

Maude said that mutualisation will help to bring about massive decentralisation. “I would recommend, with the interest this Committee has, going and visiting some of these mutuals because the way in which they operate.”

The workers “do things fantastically differently”, added Maude.

The committee’s chairman, Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin told Maude that if he wanted to develop good examples of decentralisation, his intentions should be set out in a plan.   

Said Jenkin“If your plan is to develop supreme examples and really good examples of decentralisation and innovative ways of doing things, well then set that out, because having a plan is an act of leadership and without an act of leadership there won’t be change.” 

Maude replied that setting out a plan and processes could kill mutualisation. He said:  “When we started talking about how we are going to support mutuals, the first response was: ‘Well, we need to have a plan, a programme, and devise rights and systems and processes.’ And when I reflected on that, I thought, ‘I could not think of a better way of killing the idea dead.’

“… The right approach is to find people who want to do this and support them, and as they try and set up their cooperatives and mutuals find out what the blocks are.”

Kelvin Hopkins, a Labour member of the committee, asked Maude whether mutuals would be less accountable to Parliament. Maude’s replies appeared, in part, contradictory.

He said mutuals could turn out to be more accountable. But when Jenkin said later that decentralisation means a “stretching of the elastic bands of accountability in the traditional sense”, Maude replied:

“Yes, totally.”

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Francis Maude tells civil servants: try new things and learn from failure

Posted on 16/03/2011 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister who’s in charge of reforming central government, has told MPs that “good organisations learn as much from the things that are tried and do not work as from the things that are tried and do work”.

His comments will give top-level support to those in the public sector who are seeking small budgets to experiment with, say, agile approaches to software development.  The agile principle of failing cheaply and quickly and learning the lessons is unconventional in the public sector.

Appearing before the Public Administration Committee, in its hearing on Good Governance and Civil Service Reform, Maude said:

“You need to have a culture-we do not have this yet-where people are encouraged to try new things in a sensible, controlled way; front up if they have not worked – not have a culture that assumes every failure is culpable, and for every failure there has to be a scapegoat – but actually make sure that if something is tried and does not work: 1) you stop doing it; and 2) you learn from the things that have been tried and what the lessons are.

“I do not think we are good at that … part of the reason for that is the sort of audit culture, where everything has to be accounted for to the nth degree.

“I think we waste a huge amount of time and effort in stopping bad things happening and the result is we stop huge amounts of potentially good things happening as well.”

Maude was critical of the way government takes huge risks on big projects but is hostile to innovation at the micro level. He said: 

“Government tends to be quite prone to take huge macro risks, but then at working level, at micro level, to be very risk averse and hostile to innovation.

“You do not often hear of someone’s career suffering because they preside over an inefficient status quo, but try something new that does not work and that can blot your copybook big time.”

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Government Summit Discusses Opportunities for SMEs

Posted on 11/02/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

One of the areas within the remit of the planned Director of ICT Futures within government will be changing the terrain for SMEs to enter the government marketplace. It’s useful then that this aspiration is the subject of a government summit taking place today.

The SME Strategic Supplier Summit, organised by the Cabinet Office, was hosted by Francis Maude and involved the Project and Programme Support Group. A number of SME suppliers were invited to attend the event, which was due to discuss making real the opportunities for SMEs to compete for government business.

An announcement of the new opportunities has been made on the Cabinet Office website.

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Cabinet Office publication of Phase 2 documents offers insight into Coalition G-Cloud thinking

Posted on 09/02/2011 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Cabinet Office has published a series of documents which discuss how the public sector could utilise the Cloud Computing approach to ICT delivery and explore what benefits and challenges this approach would create.

The project, known as Phase 2 of the G-Cloud Programme, features a number of reports which were developed under work strands of the ICT strategy that was published on 27th January 2010. As the Cabinet Office says, they provide a well informed baseline of public sector Cloud thinking from 2009 to early 2010.

While publishing the papers on its website – minus one on information assurance for security reasons – the Cabinet Office says further development of plans for the  adoption of the Cloud Computing approach to ICT and the delivery of cloud based services to the public sector is on-going and will reflect the objectives of the Coalition Government. It adds that  Cloud Computing principles are evolving rapidly and these will be incorporated into this work.

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Days of mega IT contracts are over – Minister

Posted on 07/12/2010 | Leave a comment
By Tony Collins
The Telegraph reports today that Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, has told an audience of chief executives from 31 key government suppliers including BT, Hewlett Packard, IBM and CapGemini, that costly IT mistakes like the £12.7bn NHS national programme [NPfIT] would not be repeated. 

Contracts in future would be for cheaper, smaller and off-the-shelf systems, not expensive, bespoke software, he said.   “Government will no longer offer the easy margins of the past. We will open up the market to smaller suppliers and mutuals and we will expect you to partner with them as equals, not as sub-ordinates.  The days of the mega IT contracts are over.  We will need you to rethink the way you approach projects, making them smaller, off the shelf and open source where possible…”

Full story here.

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John Suffolk, Government CIO, to leave – a blow to major reform?

Posted on 06/12/2010 | Leave a comment
By Tony Collins
John Suffolk has decided to leave his post as Government CIO by the end of this year, a departure that will be seen by some as a setback to the campaign for major cuts in wasteful IT-based spending in the public sector.
Suffolk confirmed his departure to me on 15 November: “Just under five years is a good stint …time to pass the baton on and give the new Government a clear run on new policies, new strategies and new people. Its been truly great working with Francis Maude. His agenda is my agenda and reverse. He will drive it [major reform] forward.”

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