Huge IT project @ St George's delayed indefinitely

ICLIP is an enormous IT project at St George's. It is supposed to cost between £10 million and £12 million over five years. I wish I could be so casual with a £2 million difference...

Despite having a tricky record when it comes to IT, St George's managers went ahead with it anyway. It pays out in around ten years. Even Stalin had five year plans...

Now it has been delayed... apparently there is no firm date for its deployment.

The Trust management appear in meltdown mode about it. The Communications department sent out a memo to all staff on the subject announcing a delay. Amusingly, the Chief Executive felt that he needed to send out another memo to all staff confirming that the Communications department were indeed telling the truth. Here is the memo:

"Dear Colleague

I am writing to confirm the content of the email sent by Jonathan Street last Friday which advised that the iCLIP Steering Committee has decided to reschedule the iCLIP deployment date. We are working with BT and the London Programme for IT to develop a new deployment plan and this is currently indicating a revised 'go live' date in the first quarter of 2009.

I’d like to thank the many staff in the Trust who have been involved with iCLIP and supported the programme over the past few months. It is important that we don’t lose focus at this stage but continue with all the work we need to do to achieve a successful deployment early next year.

For information, the full message from Jonathan is appended below.

David Astley
Chief Executive

Message dated 22 August 2008
The iCLIP Steering Committee has taken the decision to reschedule the iCLIP deployment date.
It is not unusual for delays to occur on programmes of this size and complexity. Lessons learned from other London implementations and slippages to our programme timetable have left us with insufficient time to test sufficiently the data migration and interface elements of the programme.
The iCLIP team is working with BT and the London Programme for IT to develop a new deployment plan and this is currently indicating a revised 'go live' date in the first quarter of 2009. Whilst it is disappointing that we have had to delay 'go live', it is important that all parts of the system are robustly tested and that we learn the lessons from other implementations.
In the meantime, the iCLIP team will keep you updated on progress and arrangements for training and registering for smartcards and notify you once we have finalised a revised go live date with the London Programme for IT."

With a project of this scale going wrong, the next Board meeting is going to be interesting.

There are two reasons why it could have gone wrong.

1. The project is off schedule.
2. The project is on schedule but the Trust's finances are so bad this year that they cannot afford to implement it.

We shall see...