‘Minimum competence’ absent from govt IT project

By Emmeline Saunders

A government project to create a prisoner database has been attacked by MPs over spiralling costs, poor management and long delays.
 
The National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis) was described as “a singular example of comprehensively poor project management” by the public accounts committee, which scrutinises government spending.
 
Work to the database, which was supposed to have been delivered in January 2008, was halted in August 2007 because the initial £234 million budget had trebled.
 
Committee chair Edward Leigh MP described the project as “a shambles”.  
 
“This committee has become inured to the dismal procession of government IT failures which have passed before us; but even we were surprised by the extent of the failure of C-Nomis,” he said.
 
“There was not even a minimum level of competence in the planning and execution of this project. The result has been a three year delay in the roll-out of the programme.”
 
C-Nomis was intended to deliver a single “end-to-end offender management” IT system across the prison and probation services. But the body in charge, the National Offender Management System (Noms), could not afford the escalating costs, so the project was scaled back to three offender databases for delivery in 2011 at a cost of £513 million.
 
These databases would serve prisons and probation services separately, and would each include different information about an offender, at a doubling of original costs.
 
The committee’s report said: “Noms significantly underestimated the technical complexity of the project… There was also poor planning, poor financial monitoring, inadequate supplier management and too little control over changes.”
 
A “culture of over-optimism” held sway, the committee found, and financial management was “deficient to the extent that costs and progress were not monitored or reported for the first three years”.
 
A reliance on too few senior individuals who did not have relevant experience or training, along with inadequate supplier management and little control over changes, led to problems at every stage of the project.
 
Ministers and the Home Office were kept in the dark about the true cost and stalled progress before May 2007, and £161 million is still unaccounted for by Noms.

The revised Nomis programme is going ahead for delivery in 2011, although there are still “significant challenges” to address, such as contract negotiations with suppliers.