If it wasn’t already obvious, this week’s report into Australia’s scuttled business registers transformation has left no room for misinterpretation. The case for large-scale technology projects in government no longer holds water.
This realisation is not new, with waterfall projects considered unfashionable long before the troubled Modernising Business Registers overhaul began in 2018. But it is thinking that has struggled to fully take hold in Canberra.
The Albanese government has chalked up three major tech wrecks inherited from the Coalition in less than 12 months, costing taxpayers more than $600 million. These failed projects have delivered very harsh lessons, and may act as the circuit breaker that force a rethink of the way these projects are managed in future.
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It is certainly true that many large scale government technology projects run over budget, over time and underdeliver. This is a problem for *all* large scale technology programs. Very (very) few run to time and budget unless significant “interpretations” have occurred along the way.
Rather than narrowly present this as a problem for government (which it is of course), we should consider this a problem for the industry.
For many decades, the technology industry has been developing versions of “agile” and “lean” development approaches – it would be good to see these take hold in some of this “too big to fail” (but they still do) projects.