IT Project Failures has been examining the all to frequent phenomenon of government IT project failures. Central to the analysis - typically opaque bureaucracies shy away from revealing their internal machinations, especially when it has to do with something as complex as large IT projects.

What can government leaders can do to improve the situation?  For starters, mandate transparency. OMB publishes a list of high risk IT projects, innovative state governments are making their project performance dashboards publicly available and some government agencies are publishing their project’s failure analysis out to their constituencies. Work to open a dialogue about ongoing and past IT projects at your agency, and allow any staff member or the public to participate. Create a citizen community that allows your project staff to interact directly with members of the public that might be impacted by your project. The technology to build these types of communities is getting more sophisticated.

Your government agency should consider exposing the inner workings of its projects to the public; show them what they are getting for their money. Make your internal IT teams sweat a little, transparency will help to focus them on project success. Most of all, transparency can help better align project stakeholders. When all of the actors in a project - political appointees, staff, contractors and taxpayers - share in the same information, better decisions will result, and the outcome of the project will be closer to its original objectives.

But, there’s no reason to wait until after a project has failed to begin uncloaking it - start early in the process with a public project blog or wiki, that allows both project stakeholders and the public to provide feedback on the project’s goals and progress. If you take this approach, bad projects are likely to fail earlier, and good projects will attract the positive attention they deserve.