Had it been called:

"10 out of 15 DOH projects deliver on budget and [presumably] time, while the other 5 deliver within acceptable project management limits of contingency and project tolerance."

Would it?

It’s not that much! Getting a project that complicated in almost on budget is something they should be pleased with and 8.4% is hardly worth shouting about.

That's pretty damn good considering the usual 16 figure overrun.

I assume that there will be bonuses all round given the miniscule size of the overspend, congratulations are in order.

....surely....250 grand?? Since when was this a `significant` amount in the context of covenment (mis)spending? I'm surprised anyone even noticed. They blow billions of taxpayers money on crappy ill-conceived flights of fancy all the time (wars, tech). So why make a big deal about 250,000?! ....*sniff sniff*

We are in the process of blowing millions of taxpayers hard earned pennies on NPFIT , CRS etc. Oh not to mention the whole NIR debacle. None of which will serve anyones interests other than those of covenment departments who want "all of our datas to belong to THEM"....

The problem with the overspend, underestimate the next project method, is that eventually you have a NHS and EDS problem. They ended up having to estimate below zero or cost, provide less than nothing in return and spend at least a few Billion £ in the process.

Article - thumbs down..

Comments - thumbs up...

'Lotus Notes 7 email system'

Lotus Notes email - the most evil program ever written. It's so bad it makes the rest of Notes look good.

..for El Reg to run this item.

£250K overspend on these sized projects is nothing, and as has already been mentioned, the other 10 projects were on time and on budget.

There is no news here, and there is nothing new, insightful, witty or useful in this comment either.

Everywhere I've worked, almost without exception, an overspend of 8% would be described as "in budget"!

Why was this newsworthy? Is it me?

When compare to the Olympic, these figures wont even show up as a percentage, whats the big deal ? If they really wanted to save, all they had to do is to control the Olympic and anything else overspend will be well covered

When I was working in DoH IT back in the mid-90s, we'd have killed a small mammal to be 8.4% over. I remember one project being split into two (to get round a tendering/approval limit threshold) which of course almost doubled the cost in terms of project management and QA. And still went way over budget. Before being cancelled because they didn't work.

And I imagine that the Notes/Domino upgrade cost is as much hardware refresh as licensing and implementation. Good to see they're still using Notes after twelve years. I seem to recall it was running on Solaris originally, and mainly for applications, while email was a horrible x400 thing.

"Why was this newsworthy? Is it me?"

Because it's showing that at least one area of the Government is finally getting it's over spend down to reasonable levels. Let's hope the other departments take notice and waste less of our taxes.

Mind you, they could have just well over-estimated the projects in the first place, and still come up short on some.

heartfelt congratulations to DoH...

...for bringing 10 of 15 projects in ON or BELOW budget and for miscalculating by such an utterly miniscule amount out on the other 5. A damned fine show and something to be rightly proud of... especially when one looks at the massive national overspends that have been approved in the recent past. (dome, hospital computer systems, ambulance allocation systems, scottish parliament, national identity cards and biometric passports, olympics anyone?)