Everything is OK!! REALLY!! You must believe me! All is OK.

"Failing ICT projects at Government are unnecessary" eenvandaag.nl 4 August 2011
"Why do ICT projects at Governments fail so often and so badly?" kafkabrigade.nl 29 May 2012
"Again a ICT project fails at the Government" bnr.nl 25 June 2013
"One third of ICT projects fail within Government with system decommission as a result" - tweakers.net 25 April 2014
"ICT-projects at Government: nobody is hold accountable for failing" - ftm.nl 14 May 2014
"ICT and Government; most often the quality levels are pathetic" - fd.nl 13 October 2014

Just a few online headlines that pop up when you Google "Government ICT projects fail" (in Dutch). It does not paint a nice picture about the success rate of ICT projects within the Dutch Government. That this is not a typical Dutch problem is made clear by the list on Wikipedia called "List of failed and overbudget custom software projects". Apparently government bodies and technology projects are not the best match.

Not only newspapers noticed a mismatch. In 2014 an official governmental task force was put in place to in investigate all recent ICT projects conducted. Their findings were quite shocking. In total 36% of the larger icy-projects within the Netherlands, with a budget more than 7.5 million euro fail so badly that the system to be implemented is decommissioned even before it is fully operational. For 57% of these major projects, no decommission takes place, but are more expensive than budgeted or do not deliver the results as required. On a yearly basis this leads to a loss of 4 to 5 million euro (1).

In just two words: not good. Luckily for us normal citizens, there is a website created by the Dutch Government where we can find the status of all ICT projects currently being undertaken. This Dashboard shows two main KPIs: status on Budget and on Delivery Time. The Status can have three colors:

Green: Normal
Amber: Attention needed
Red: Action needed

The displayed color indicates the state of affairs of the project on the reference date. Given the headlines mentioned, one would expect a lot of Amber and Green in this KPI dashboard. So let's have a closer look at the Defense Department, spending the most money on ICT (6 projects with a total of 364 mln euro).

rijksictdashboard.nl - Defense Department

At the Defense Department everything is ok! All the misery is probably in some of the other departments. So I had a look at the others and to my complete surprise ALL departments report GREEN on both delivery time and costs!

HUH???!

How is it, that the KPIs are green for all governmental departments while everybody is screaming that ICT projects are failing by the dozen? Why would a government go all te way to build a website showing their results and clearly present performance brighter than even their own task-force found. And more importantly for this blog. What can we learn from it?

Almost all companies have to present their performance in one way or another to external stakeholders. In the Netherlands the Government is obliged to report all progress and they've chosen to do this via an easy to find and simple website. In itself this is nobel and can only be cheered. However one should present the truth in order to come across as being honest. Of course it easy to construct two simple KPIs in such a way that they almost certainly turn GREEN.  The thing is that this will in the end bite itself in the tail. Best is to be clear about your performance. Don't make it nicer than it really is. Not only for your credibility towards the outside world, but also towards your internal employees. They see the "real" performance and might start questioning the integrity of senior management if external KPIs present a different story. And maybe even more important; use the same KPIs within your organization as the ones that you present to your external stakeholders. Don't create specific KPIs for the outside world. In this case, it is almost impossible to believe that these two simple KPIs are the only ones that the government is using themselves. And if your stakeholders expect you to manage your performance with certain KPIs (like most regulators do), make them your internal KPIs. Furthermore it is wise to explain how your KPIs are constructed. What do you measure your success against? What are your thresholds? What do you measure (e.g. budget or actual money spent)? How do you incorporate setbacks? What risks were already incorporated in your budget and will not effect your view on performance? What tolerance did you agreed upon?

But above all be transparent. If things go wrong, be honest about it and tell everybody how you think you can manage the issues at hand. That is what good governance is about!

(1) Parlementair onderzoek naar ICT-projecten bij de overheid (See here the Endreport in Dutch)