It shouldn’t take more than €5m to learn the value of sound project management, says Billy MacInnes
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You know the old saying: The secret of great comedy is timing. Or there’s that other one: Timing in life is everything.
I find myself musing on the subject of timing because of the serendipitous turn of events that led to the publication of the Expert Advisory Committee’s Independent Review on 20 January into the Arts Council’s IT upgrade that led to the write-off of €5.3 million before it was abandoned.
According to the report on the RTE website, the review identified five key factors that contributed to the failure of the project. The business case “understated the costs”; the scope and objectives changed across the project’s lifecycle; systems of governance “failed”; and there was “low senior management cohesion; an immature risk culture; and limited Board oversight”. As if that wasn’t enough, the Arts Council lacked ICT expertise, relied too much on third party suppliers and did not manage contracts properly.
According to a report in The Irish Times in February last year the Minister for Arts Patrick O’Donovan listed three IT companies that had received payment for work on the project at a Cabinet meeting: Codec which received €1.97 million, Ergo which received €2.11 million and Expleo which was paid €734,701.
Anyway, who hasn’t made mistakes along the way? You can’t be right all the time, right? Maybe not, but you can be wrong quite a lot of the time. For instance, the Arts Council conducted a lessons-learned exercise in 2021 which stated: “The key stakeholders should consider stopping or pausing the project to address key issues”. The Business & Finance Committee noted the report but decided not to bring it to the Board or the Audit & Risk Committee. They must have thought it wasn’t worth causing a fuss over.
There was also a slackness in communications between the Arts Council and the Dept of Arts & Culture and it appears the department was not kept up to date on the challenges with the project.
Worse still, when the department did become aware “of the multiple increases in the project budget, matters related to the project were not escalated within the department to the appropriate level”.
So, as I was saying, timing. A week after the review, the Irish Government announced the National Development Finance Agency (NDFA) to “offer direct support and assistance to departments on the development of major capital projects”.
It helpfully listed the areas where the NDFA could provide advice and support to departments and agencies, nearly all of which would have been helpful for the Arts Council: corporate governance arrangements for projects; development of a project programme; identification of necessary internal resourcing and any external services required; ensuring strategic assessment is in line with the Infrastructure Guidelines; preparation of the preliminary business case, the detailed business case, and the final business case; preparation of a project execution plan; development of the procurement strategy and procurement documentation; support for the construction phase and advice on potential project change plans.
Getting exercised
According to the government, the NDFA will reduce the need for departments to undergo “lengthy, multiple procurement exercises” to obtain the assistance they might need for each individual project and will “drive consistency and standardisation across project development. Together, this will reduce the development time for projects and should result in lower costs, delivering faster and more cost-effective capital projects”.
It claims that the NDFA could reduce the project development cycle for major capital projects by 12 months.
Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform & Digitalisation Jack Chambers stated: “By professionalising and standardising the support offered for project development through the NDFA we can accelerate major capital projects ensuring high quality infrastructure that delivers value for money.”
The new service comes at the same time as the government has embarked on reforms to the legal and regulatory systems designed to “systematically address barriers, slash red tape and remove unnecessary delays”.
Now, I’m not trying to be difficult here but reductions in regulation and the slashing of red tape don’t automatically result in better governance, stronger scrutiny, more efficient delivery and greater value for money. Sometimes, they achieve the exact opposite.
Nevertheless, if the launch of the NDFA means that the state suffers fewer project failures or massive cost overruns, that would be most welcome.
Which seems an appropriate place to return to the subject of timing. When you consider the timing of the review’s publication and the creation of the NDFA, it’s funny to note that if the latter had happened before the former, there might never have been a need for the review at all. I say “might” because no one can guarantee that the government won’t find itself launching a review into a failed project in the future. But if it happens after the NDFA has been widely adopted, that would be an example of what we might call great comedy.