for Local Governments

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ICT for Local Governments
Standards, principles and best practices
5.1.7 Factor questions related to other issues
Factor Question 7. Are there other factors likely to cause the e-government project to
fail?
These might relate to money or timescales as well as other issues.
Answer Rating : from 0 for ‘yes’ through 5 for ‘perhaps’ to 10 for ‘no’.
Once all the questions are answered, the rating scores are summarized and can be interpreted
according to the Table 14.
Table 14: Rating scores
Overall Rating Likely Outcome
0 - 20 e-government project will almost certainly fail unless action is taken.
21 - 40 e-government project may well fail unless action is taken.
41 - 60 e-government might fail totally, or might well be a partial failure unless action
is taken.
61 - 80 e-government project might be a partial failure unless action is taken.
81 - 100 e-government project may well succeed.
The basic factor rating technique makes a questionable assumption - that all factors
are equally important to the success and failure of the project. A more complex variation
would involve two rounds. In the first round, the risk assessment team would
assign a weight to each of the identified factors - external pressure, internal political
desire, overall vision/strategy, project management, change management, politics/selfinterest,
design, competencies, technological infrastructure, other. An ‘ordinary’ factor
might be given a weight of 1; a factor that was considered ‘important’ in the particular
e-government project could be given a weight of 2; and a factor that was considered
‘very important’ in the particular project could be given a weight of 3. The weighting
score would be multiplied by the rating to give an overall set of weighted ratings. For
example, if external pressure was felt to be very important for this specific project, it
could be given a weight of 3. If that pressure was found to be only moderate, it could
be given a rating of 5. The overall weighted rating for that factor would be 3 x 5 = 15.
A more complex variation again would involve three rounds. In the first round, the risk
assessment team would assess which factors are relevant to the success and failure of
the particular e-government project. It would consider not only those factors listed just
above, but also other factors as well. The second round would weight these factors.
The third round would give a rating score to each factor.