Birmingham Oracle project: Data cleansing and resourcing issues
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Councillors at audit committee urged to ensure strong project governance, adequate tech staffing levels and change management procedures
Questions raised during the latest audit committee meeting at Birmingham City Council show continued concerns among councillors that the project will fail to go live on time, as well as around technical and staffing issues, and whether an effective change management programme is in place.
During the audit committee meeting that took place at the end of January, auditor Grant Thorton was questioned by councillors on the risks facing the Oracle reimplementation project, which include insufficient data cleansing and the 5% chance that the project may be abandoned.
The budget for phase one of the original Oracle implementation project at Birmingham City council was £19m. As Computer Weekly has previously reported, this project caused major disruption to council finances when it went live, resulting in the decision to reimplement the Oracle system. In answer to a written question by councillor Paul Tilsey, the committee was informed that the total forecast cost of the programme covered 2027/28 is now £144m
Thomas Foster, principal consultant at Grant Thornton, identified several key risks associated with the Oracle ERP reimplementation programme. He noted that the programme has a large volume of work and complex tasks that need to be completed before the system can go live. This includes addressing technical defects, gaps in processes, and ensuring readiness for implementation.
Foster warned that there was a lack of data quality in the Oracle reimplementation project, saying: “At the time of writing, we found that the process for documenting data quality standards and ensuring that data is ready for migration was not well-established for finance in particular.”
The project has been plagued with delays and rising costs. The audit committee was told the go-live date would be in July 2026, but this could slip to September 2026. Foster said: “The proposal to delay the go live recognises both the volume and the complexity of work still to be delivered, and the need to manage that workload.”
Foster urged councillors at the audit committee meeting to maintain robust governance processes, even if the project is under the pressure to meet deadlines. “It’s important that the governance process stays robust under pressure…The greater risk is that governance standards are compromised over and above any potential financial and reputational risks associated with further slippage,” he said.
Foster also noted that limited resources in the project and the wider organisation had been identified as a risk. He urged the council to manage staff workloads actively and ensure sufficient capacity for both the pre-implementation and post-implementation phases of the Oracle reimplementation.
“There are limited resources available to manage the demands of this programme, not just within the programme but also in the wider business,” he added.
Staff under pressure
Councillor Richard Parkins asked the committee about resource challenges facing the Oracle reimplementation project, particularly the pressure facing staff who need to balance their day-to-day responsibilities with the demands of the project.
Programme director Philip Marpherson said that more than 100 full-time employees were working directly on the programme, some of whom have been taken off their existing council roles. “The programme funds quite a lot of backfill, so we have directly funded people, permanent employees to come in and support the programme while their day job is being done by agency staff,” he said.
The auditor emphasised the need for strong governance and a change management programme to enable the Oracle reimplementation programme to succeed.
Responding to a question regarding change management, Carol Culley, executive director of finance at Birmingham City Council, who has overall responsibility for the Oracle reimplementation programme, said: “We are monitoring things like how many people do POs [purchase orders], how leave gets approved.” She added that this gives an indication of the programme team’s preparatory work.
Councillor Meirion Jenkins asked whether there was a 5% or 10% risk that the Oracle reimplementation project would be abandoned. Foster answered Jenkins’ question saying that a 5% probability of abandonment was a low estimate.
“Given that 5% is a low estimate, at the present stage from the evidence we’ve looked at, it seems low – not inconceivable, but it’s more likely that it will be a successful programme, whenever it gets to go live,” he added.
When asked by councillor Jaime Scott about fixing the Oracle system once it has been implemented and gone live, Macpherson said the team has set thresholds around defects to manage expectations and ensure the system is functional after the go-live date.
“There’s a difference between something where the system is broken and it’s not functioning properly versus a bow wave of people wanting support,” he said, adding that the team is undergoing a rigorous process to reduce the number of genuine defects in the system’s design and configuration.
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