Consequences: Closure of all 189 projects with financial losses.
Projects could have been saved by proper planning and flexibility to change.
5) The UK National Health Service national e-health project
The UK National Health Service (NHS) began a project to create nationwide e-health records and also upgrade their IT infrastructure. However, the project failed.
Cost: Accenture Corp. ended up spending $55 billion dollars. However, the original budget was $29 billion. That’s a $26 billion, or 90%, overrun.
Cause of failure: The project, run by Accenture, Computer Sciences Corp., Fujitsu, and others, has been plagued by software problems and resistance from physicians. The vendors faced big penalties if deadlines weren’t met. Accenture took a $450 million earnings hit as a result.
The project could have been saved by timely and proper planning and risk management (5).
6) Project: ERP Navy pilot projects USA
The implementations involved different Navy system commands and a number of systems integrators, including IBM, Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Deloitte & Touche LLP. The pilot projects were meant to help modernize the Navy’s supply chain, acquisition and financial management operations, among others. For example, the Naval Air Systems Command and Naval Supply Systems Command wanted to optimize forecasting, repair scheduling and inventory management for aircraft. Government Accountability Office said that the installations were redundant and incompatible and failed to meet Navy requirements because of their limited scope (6).
Cost: In short, the efforts were failures, and $1 billion was largely wasted.
Reason of failure: Failure to access the risks involved in implementing this project on this large scale. A project of this magnitude is larger, harder and more expensive than the largest of corporate giants would encounter. Simply stated, it’s a project that has a high degree of risk under the best of circumstances.
Consequences: U.S. Navy could successfully use commercial off-the-shelf ERP software and could go without this project not mentioning the finances wasted.
7) Project: National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis IT system) UK
The system was designed to amalgamate information on offenders into a single database, giving staff in prisons and the probation service an overview of criminals, and cut the risk of re-offending. The project failed in almost every possible way – but the project’s main board and ministers were kept unaware of the full problems until it was too late to rescue the original scheme.
