'Serious Weaknesses' Undermined BBC's DMI Project - Report

"Serious weaknesses in project management and reporting, a lack of focus on business change and piecemeal assurance arrangements" have been blamed for the failure of the BBC's Digital Media Initiative (DMI) technology project.
The BBC Trust has published a report into the DMI, which was "intended to improve production efficiency by enabling BBC staff to develop, create, share and manage video and audio content and programming on their desktop".
The project was closed in May 2013, with the remaining DMI assets being written down at a total cost of £98.4m.
The Trust commissioned PwC to conduct a review of the management and reporting of the project.
A technical review was carried about by Accenture on behalf of the BBC Executive in Autumn 2012, which directly led to the project's closure. However, PwC found that "no single event or issue caused DMI to fail". It said the programme governance structure implemented was "not effective in dealing with the complexity of the project".
It also said that the project's structure lacked an executive steering board (ESB) to challenge the progress of DMI against agreed quality, time and cost metrics.
The report revealed Corporate Governance bodies were "not provided with a clear view of the status of DMI through the formal reporting of progress and management of risk," and that "the focus and priorities of DMI were on technology build and not sufficiently on enabling BBC-wide change."
The DMI was intended to change and standardise working practices across all of the BBC, yet the PwC report said "the BBC Executive's view of progress could have been more clearly informed by taking into account reporting by projects dependent on DMI...of the impacts on the business coming from delays in delivery."
It said: "The lack of an integrated assurance plan reduced the effectiveness of governance in managing risk."
"In summary," the report added, "the complexities of DMI and a series of missed milestones, combined with weaknesses in DMI governance, risk management and reporting arrangements meant that it took longer than we would have expected for the BBC to reach Executive agreement on the future for DMI."
Diane Coyle, Vice Chairman of the BBC Trust, said: "The failure of the DMI project came at an unacceptable cost to licence fee payers and PwC found serious weaknesses in the governance of the project.
"We announced (in December) that we were strengthening project reporting arrangements within a clearer governance system. That will enable the BBC Executive to ensure any serious problems are spotted and addressed more swiftly. In turn, the Trust will have the up-to-date information it needs to investigate if things continue to go wrong.
"We will be more rigorous and transparent about assessing BBC performance in future and that will include retrospective reviews of other big projects and an assessment, for 2014-15, of the BBC's progress in implementing PwC's recommendations."
www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust
(IT/JP)