Key lesson

Department's response

NAO comments

Departments should ensure that they analyse and understand fully the implications of the introduction of new IT systems for their businesses and customers.

The need for new IT systems for magistrates' courts was identified in a number of official reports, including one from the Committee of Public Accounts. The frailty of legacy systems has increased this need over time.

The Department has been working with staff from the Magistrates' Courts Committees on the required content of the IT system for several years. Committees signed up to a single national IT system with which they would have to conform. The impact of the major programme of Committee amalgamations during the late 1990s was one of the factors which determined the "minimum change" approach.

The business case took into account savings from closing down old IT systems but anticipated only modest savings from the introduction of the new system because they could not be estimated with certainty.

A Magistrates' Courts Committee-led group was responsible for drawing up the Statement of Business Requirements, and lead users approved documents detailing the analysis of those requirements.

The contract requires ICL to carry out a post-implementation review of each local Committee's migration to the new office automation infrastructure. Joint reviews have been carried out at each Committee after live running commenced. Findings have been fed back to the migration process and there has been measurable improvement in ICL delivery processes and Committee satisfaction over the period since national roll-out commenced.

Ideally business processes should have been redesigned in parallel with a new IT system being developed. This would have helped to secure the most efficient and effective way of carrying out the operations of Magistrates' Courts Committees.

Departments must consider carefully the scale and complexity of projects to assess whether they are achievable.

The Department understood the scale and complexity of the project at the time the contract was awarded to ICL, given that it had been working on delivering its predecessor for a number of years. The detailed functional specification from the old system was used as the basis for the PFI contract. The bidders' proposals were carefully checked to make sure they had fully understood the complexity of the requirement and that delivery timescales reflected this. The project reviews in 1999 confirmed that the project was deliverable within the contractual timescales.

The Department should have considered, before letting the contract, the advantages of having the infrastructure and office automation part of the project delivered early before the roll-out of the core application.

Delays in implementing projects place them at risk of being overtaken by technological change.

The infrastructure being rolled out is based on the latest professional operating system, Windows 2000. The Department's contract with ICL requires ICL to "refresh" the workstations and software after four years. Other components such as servers have a longer life. The original ICL software application was based on the latest version of Oracle software. The revised approach is based on a modern database and will conform to the Criminal Justice Information Technology standard for a web-based service.

There has been significant increase in the use of PCs, and office IT services since the original requirement was written and the contract renegotiation has provided the opportunity to bring the requirement up to date.

Since the contract was let technological advances have been made, for example, wide use of the Internet and the Government Secure Intranet. These developments have been incorporated into the revised contract.

The project specification must take into account the business needs of the organisation and the requirements of users.

The users within the Magistrates' Courts Committees drew up the Statement of Business Requirement. The main priority, agreed by the Department and users, was to implement a standard system to replace the ageing existing systems. This would protect the business and provide a common platform to exploit opportunities for any future changes to the business processes both within the magistrates' courts and in the wider criminal justice system. More than 100 users have worked alongside developers to define detailed requirements and the migration process. Several senior customers are members of the Programme Board and Strategic Board.

Getting input and approval from 42 independent Magistrates' Courts Committees has always been difficult. The creation this year of a Senior User Group representing all 42 Committees has been a significant improvement.

For infrastructure, users from many Committees were involved in the specification and review of migration processes. Whilst implementation of office automation follows a set of standard processes, there is flexibility within these to accommodate business needs of the local organisation.

Magistrates' Courts Committees had a difficult relationship with the Department. The Department was responsible for providing a single view of requirements for the new system across 42 Magistrates' Courts Committees but this was difficult to achieve.

Senior management has a crucial role to play in championing the successful development of IT systems.

Throughout the Libra development there has been strong senior management support and involvement. During the early years this came from the Director-General, Policy in the Department. Subsequently the Chief Executive of the Court Service took over this role. The Permanent Secretary of the Department has been involved from the outset. The project has had a Senior Responsible Owner since the role was recommended in 2000.

It is vital that departments pay attention to the management of risks and have contingency plans in case projects are not implemented as planned.

Risk management has been a feature of the project throughout and risks were jointly managed with the supplier. The risk management procedures have, however, been progressively improved in the last 12 months and now conform to the procedures set down in the Court Service risk management guidelines.

The Department had, however, only a high-level contingency plan in place at the start of the project in case ICL did not deliver against the contract. It is recognised that this was inadequate and detailed contingency plans were drawn up only when it became clear that the contract might have been in jeopardy due to timescale and cost overruns.

For each infrastructure roll-out a local risk management plan is agreed and monitored.

The Department should have had detailed contingency arrangements in place from the start of the project. It was, however, hampered in this respect because of the original low number of bidders for the project.

Relations between the department and the supplier will have a crucial effect on the success of the project.

The first Senior Responsible Officer for the Department was its Director-General, Policy. In the first two years of the project, there were a number of changes of ICL manager. This made it difficult for the Department to build and maintain long-term and meaningful relationships with ICL.

ICL has attended senior project management boards since the contract was awarded and was given full membership status in 2001. Libra staff were collocated with ICL development staff at Winnersh, to provide input on detailed requirements and plan testing etc.

The Department and ICL have undertaken relationship workshops during the contract, including one with the company since the signing of the new contract.

During infrastructure roll-out, senior managers on both sides have met regularly to plan, monitor and manage implementation and service management. The Department has provided account managers to work in a tripartite arrangement with ICL and Magistrates' Courts Committee staff at each Committee, to deliver jointly each Committee implementation. Feedback from post-implementation reviews has been that this organisational approach forged close relationships at local level and that this team effort was critical to the successful local implementation of Libra office automation.

The lack of continuity hampered the Department's understanding of progress on the project. It should have taken a more proactive role in understanding how ICL was developing the core application and whether it was an approach that would lead to delivery of the project to price and schedule. This was, however, an early PFI project and there was a feeling held by both parties that the risks of development had been passed to ICL. The use of relationship workshops is an improvement.

Contracts between departments and suppliers must be clearly set out.

The PFI contract with ICL was very detailed and comprehensive and drawn up with the help of commercial lawyers. There are also local agreements with each Magistrates' Courts Committee, which provide them with details of what to expect from the services and allow them to specify local details. The contract renegotiation has indicated areas where the contract could have been clearer and improvements have been built into the revised contract.

Sufficient time and resources should be spent on ensuring that staff know how to use the IT system.

Full training was given to all staff when the infrastructure was rolled out. A catalogue of further training is available for subsequent use. The new software application has not yet been delivered but full training and customer support is being built into contracts. Planning for migration, both of the infrastructure and the software application, begins a year before migration starts to ensure that preparation is comprehensive and effective.

ICL carries out evaluation of all training and the consequent training evaluation reports are agreed as part of the post-implementation review at each Magistrates' Courts Committee. Lessons learned are fed back into the process and have resulted in corrective action.