Transforming Government 2017 Programme: Identifying Critical Success Factors for Government Projects

The focus of this year’s Transforming Government workshop (tGov) is to debate and better understand how to manage and institutionalise the as yet unknown but potentially radical changes needed to the UK Government’s IT systems (including technology, people, and governance), with an overall theme of capability and readiness in the context of post-Brexit Britain. The output will be a synthesis of ideas to inform advice to the Government and the scope of any emerging potential joint research funding bid.

The workshop has called for papers on proposals for tackling the challenge of preparing the IT systems in public administration in line with policy and legislative changes that will be introduced to support Brexit.

In particular, position-viewpoint papers and proposals that aim to explore the potential measures that would enable the design of coherent approached to managing a complex multi-institutional ‘process and IT systems reengineering initiative’ across government are sought.

Attending the workshop will be academics from FoML and across the sector, EU officials and current and retired Government officials, alongside current MPs and retired CIOs of government.

If hundreds of very smart and very able people have spent more than 20 years struggling to manage such projects, and others have meanwhile been trying to work out why there are repeated failures, then maybe it isn't that project managers are all continually doing things badly. Instead, perhaps they are all trying to solve the wrong problems — so that despite their talent and best efforts they cannot succeed. Therefore we are exploring whether there is an alternative problem definition or model that suggests a different approach to dealing with the challenges presented by major government projects.