How to avoid 'too many cooks spoiling the silicon broth': an approach to making public and third sector multi-agency IT procurement work better

Most public sector IT procurement is multi-agency. This means that a ‘partnership’ or ‘collective’ of organisations or departments are given the task of defining needs and outcomes for an IT development project and then managing its delivery, role out and support.

The job of defining what is needed for an IT build, re-build or next stage development is difficult enough if a single agency is responsible for it. This is because needs, legislation and technology change continually. Add to this a multi-agency client and the best case scenario is one where perhaps part of the commissioning group get part of what they hoped.

A lot of projects however don't turn out for the best. In many cases the project will simply fall apart leaving a legacy of wasted public money, broken and unusable systems and tattered relationships both within the procurement group and with the developer. This can still happen, even that everyone was trying as hard as they possibly could and a recognised project management method like Prince2 was used throughout.

Some of the reasons that multi-agency IT procurement fails are:
Expectations and needs are rarely fully revealed and unpacked sufficiently to avoid misunderstanding between agencies
IT solutions are often expected to provide miracle cures to inter-agency working that are really cultural or people problems
Rigid implementation of big clever designs allows little room for changes to requirements to be added or systems to be developed in such a way that they can cope with change effectively
It isn’t until the thing has been developed that people realise that that wasn’t quite what they needed

These problems can be avoided and addressed through the adoption of methods that have worked effectively elsewhere in the IT industry. Such methods do not need to replace the methods that the government wants to see used for development (Prince2), but they can compliment Prince2 to provide new tools to fix common problems. These tools come from the group of methodologies known as Agile.

Agile takes a different approach to the process of specifying development needs and outcomes by placing much greater emphasis on defining the exploration and prioritising of such needs and outcomes through common language and thorough exploration. Agile also assumes that change is constant and therefore is the friend of IT development rather than the enemy waiting to derail well intentioned projects. But most importantly from the point of view of multi-agency procurement, it can be applied very effectively to ensure that there are no hidden or unrealistic expectations hiding in the specification or the contractual and design documentation that will lead to development failure.

Agile Lab use facilitated story writing workshops to help multi-agency teams unearth the potential problems before they become real problems. We also use workshops to help get derailed projects back on track.

We believe that the people involved in broken multi-agency IT procurement, whether the supplier or the supplied are generally well intentioned and will try the hardest. However, this alone is not enough. Without the right tools for the job problems will fester and can lead to disaster. We can help get your project back on track or heading the right direction quickly, saving you money, time and stress.

Get us in and get on!