About once every month, the papers in Wisconsin's state capital of Madison run an article on the latest scandal related to a state IT project that is over budget, late, mismanaged, and generally messed up. Over the last year or so, we've seen a driver's license software program get bad press because it functioned worse than the system it replaced, there have been scandals regarding e-mail systems and server consolidation projects at state agencies, a parting of ways with a consulting firm that was failing in developing a voter registration system (http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=4414), an audit report identifying numerous projects that were behind and over budget, and now today's latest regarding a state Medicaid program that is exceeding its original budget and timeline (http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=264282&ntpid=3).
State politicians decry the mismanagement, announce investigations, agency directors resign and replacements are appointed with promises to do better, and the mess continues. One problem is that politicians and political appointees have no business overseeing projects, especially IT projects. It's one thing to build highways and bridges on time - these are known entities with plenty of supporting historical data on which to build good estimates for budgets and schedule (Boston's Big Dig, a project which was quietly closed recently, does not count. No one had ever attempted anything of that scale before. On the other hand, the Marquette Interchange project in downtown Milwaukee is fairing pretty well). IT projects, as I may have mentioned in this blog, are completely different animals.
When huge IT projects start to go awry, as they so often do, the political motivation is to cover up the problem rather than apply project management practices to it. Doubtless, on most if not all of these projects there is a state employee, a project manager, who knows what the right things to do are and wants to do them: Report status accurately, hold vendors and project team members accountable, and find ways to recover the project, or at least update plans and status based on what is really happening. But at each reporting level above them, there is someone whose cozy job is dependent on bad news not getting out for as long as possible.
Successful, professional project management is dependent on transparency and an absence of consequences for project managers who perform their function properly. It's not breaking new ground here to state that successful projects require an environment in which project managers and project teams are rewarded for honesty and collaboration, and held accountable for obscuring facts and real status, engaging in turf wars and empire-building and general failure to collaborate for the benefit of the project and its stakeholders.
A system in which political appointees and/or elected officials are responsible for overseeing project management of state IT projects is doomed to fail. Only an independent professional project management office could provide the processes, leadership and oversight needed to ensure that state IT projects are effectively, and more importantly, honestly managed. Wisconsin state IT projects are the subject of numerous "official" proposals for bringing better oversight to these projects. None of the proposals or ideas I have seen call for leadership and oversight by senior-level professional project managers.
I think this means that we will be reading about troubled Wisconsin IT projects for years to come.
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