The project issues
The Isle of Wight Council’s IEG4.5 statement, produced in July 2005, indicated a very low percentage of BVPI157 targets met and/ or likely to be met by the end of 2005.

The Council subsequently received significant funding from the ODPM via the IDeA to assist in a concentrated effort designed to achieve as close as possible to 100% of targets by the end of December 2005.

A number of parallel initiatives and programmes were undertaken including:

• Appointment of a new e-Government Project Manager
• Development of a new project plan to bring the project out of exception
• Temporary employment of e-Government officers
• Temporary secondment of council officers into the e-Government Team
• Development of an e-Forms facility; and
• Upgrading of A-Z services list facility on iwight.com

In addition the Council commissioned Socitm Consulting to validate the progress and approach, develop a project plan and assist with its implementation.

The Socitm Consulting solution
Socitm Consulting analysed the current position by using esd-Toolkit reports as a basis for discussion with members of the e-Government team and other key contributors to the project. From this analysis we were able to produce an initial report which:

• Validated the current position regarding level of conformance to BVPI 157
• Validated the definitions being used to assess conformance
• Highlighted the high risk areas; and
• Recommended actions required to mitigate those risks.

From the Council’s overarching Project plan we developed individual plans for each e-Government Officer. We then monitored progress against these Project Plans over the three months leading up to the deadline for submission of the IEG5 Statement, concentrating on the high risk areas and those where problems or issues were identified maintaining Issue and Risk Logs.

By progressively directing resources to addressing the bottlenecks and problem areas, the number of outstanding interactions was reduced until the Council was able to achieve 99.1% conformance against a national average of 97%.

The benefits to the client
The client reported in the Client Assessment Form that: “The consultant hit the ground running and was quickly running the project as specified within our agreement, this made my life a lot easier, knowing that the project was in competent hands. I was impressed that the consultant was able to quickly validate, develop and implement the project plan created by the Authority.”

Project identification
Client organisation: Isle of Wight Council
Client contact: Andy Fahey, e-Government Manager, 01983 821000, andy.fahey@iow.gov.uk
Lead consultant: martin.green@socitm.gov.uk
Project no: 5492