6. Dear Santa... so sorry (an update post 25th December), Governance SIG Spring newsletter 2016

6. Dear Santa... so sorry (an update post 25th December)

I (and my friends) asked you for six things at Christmas, so I thought I'd see what had happened since then.

My colleague Suzanne Davison quickly spotted (7th January) a continuation of 'symptoms', as follows:

"Well, it did not take long for my item on the wish list to Santa to not get granted...

Today, I heard on the radio that the Alzheimer's Society is being castigated by regulators for not taking appropriate care of sensitive personal data  - apparently, among other things, volunteers on its teams were exchanging unencrypted data about individual sufferers using their personal computers and personal email addresses!

Also, yesterday, I heard, again on the radio, about a report from the NAO that said at least one third of government projects were rated "red" or "amber-red" in terms of likelihood not to deliver on time.
It is all there on the NAO website (as noted above) - absence of portfolio management at government and department level; inadequacy of performance measurement data, poor early stage planning, lack of capacity and capability, lack of clear accountability for leadership of projects, no systematic monitoring of whether anticipated benefits have been achieved...(and more)".  All things I think we have addressed in the GovSIG's guides on good governance.

I seem to remember others on the GovSIG wished for things like better control, management and governance of projects - looks like Santa thought we had all been naughty boys and girls last year!"

Colin Ellis has made a positive suggestion, however:  See "One Thing to Think About" later in this newsletter.

We continue to live in hope!

Yours PM

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