The Wardman Wire

[Update 5pm 4/8/2009: Paul Bradshaw has asked me to note that this story was originally investigated by the Help Me Investigate project, which is a crowd-sourced Birmingham project for investigative Citizen Journalism, and one of the roots of a movement which will - I hope - show one of the threads of future investigative journalism. I'm pleased to recognise that.]

Via Simon Dickson:

The truth came out in an FOI request lodged by Heather Brooke, the ‘unsung hero‘ of the MPs’ expenses row, using MySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow website. (And if you’re ever asking for similar information, you could do worse than copy and paste her letter to Birmingham.) The council’s reply, embedded below, reveals that the original £580k project was intended to last 7 months; its scope was then formally ‘modified’, moving the date back by two and a half years (!). Subsequent revisions and delays bring us to August 2009.

What does one say?

• Ouch?
• WTF? WTF? WTF? … *headdesk* !

One more reason why transparency and openness are basic necessities for *everything*:

Birmingham Council are going to be lambasted, but I also want to point out the context. The IT Contracting Industry, which used to be able to help projects like this get out of their holes, is a mere shadow of its former self due to repeated targetting by Gordon Brown and friends, from Dawn Primarolo and the idiotic IR35 system, via the bureaucratic overkill Agency Regulation and the Arctic Systems case, to the most recent proposals to change he law again after the Govt lost that case.

Policies set by Government’s which understand neither IT, entrepreneurialism, or modern management, egged on by the corporatist lobby of the Trades Unions, inevitably lead to the Tar Pit where big bureaucracies fight themselves to a standstill.

Do not forget.

This is really the same message as small people in local communities who want just to get things done, but find that they spend waste 80% of their volunteer time wrestling with procedures and paperwork.

If you study the documents you will find that one key reason for the “budget expansion” is due to those old enemies of professional project managers – Requirements’ Creep and Scope Expansion. These were the lessons that I was learning on my university software engineering course in the 1980s, from the fruit of bitter experience in project management of the previous 2 to 3 decades.

WTF ? WTF? WTF? *headdesk*, indeed.