Success and Failure in eGovernment Projects

Techniques

"Is My Project Likely To Fail?" - Assessing Risk in eGovernment Projects

Most e-government projects fail (follow this link for evidence in this sense). Many e-government practitioners therefore fear failure and would like to know if their project is likely to fail. In other words, they would like to perform some kind of risk assessment on their project. This page offers some basic guidance on how to assess risk on e-government projects in developing/transitional countries.

General Questions About Risk Assessment

Specific Risk Assessment Techniques:

1. Simple Factor Rating

This takes a very simplistic and subjective approach, based on an analysed list of success and failure factors for e-government projects. This provides a rating for the presence and absence of these factors. Follow this link to find out how to rate the success/failure factors for your e-government project.

2. Design-Reality Gap Assessment

A gap exists for all e-government projects between the design assumptions/requirements and the reality of the client public sector organisation. The larger the gap between design and reality, the greater the chance that the project will fail. Follow this link to find out how to measure the design-reality gap for your e-government project.

3. Other Techniques

The following are links to alternative risk assessment methods and toolkits.

UK Office of Government Commerce

A guide to risk assessment on e-government projects:

http://www.ogc.gov.uk/sdtoolkit/deliveryteam/risk/assessrisks.html

State of California

Risk Assessment Model:

http://www2.state.id.us/itrmc/pubs&resources/resources/ram_index.htm

Willcocks/Margetts Risk Assessment Model

An article describing post hoc use of a model for understanding the sources of risk in public sector projects:

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~johnson/papers/NHS_paper_CTW.pdf

 

 

Page Author: Richard Heeks. Last updated on 19 October, 2008.
Please contact richard.heeks@manchester.ac.uk with comments and suggestions.