Project Woes Plague Government

Believe it or not, when I started out to write an article about project management in government, I was looking for success stories. Unfortunately in my search for roses of success all I could find were the weeds of failure. What became troubling was the fact that the abundance of project failures is so prevalent and perpetual. Especially disturbing about the failures found is their financial magnitude. We are not talking $10,000 here, $100,000 there; nope, how about $50 million here or a billion there?

For example, it seems that Department of Motor Vehicles’ IT projects are especially prone to failure. In 1987, California’s DMV blew through $45 million before cancelling a re-do of its driver license and registration system project six years later in 1993. And that year marked Oregon’s venture into the DMV project abyss. What was to be a five-year, $50 million dollar effort rocketed to a staggering $120 million and was officially declared a disaster in 2001.

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