I find these num­bers stag­ger­ing, but this story over at silicon.com details how the MoD has writ­ten off a pro­ject which has so far cost £130 mil­lion! They will be keep­ing the hard­ware they already bought for £12.2 mil­lion, res­ult­ing in a write off value of approx­im­ately £118 million.

The Defence Logist­ics Organ­isa­tion (DLO) – the MoD’s internal buy­ing arm – canned a single com­mon invent­ory pro­ject called Defence Stores Man­age­ment Solu­tion (DSMS), which would have enabled more accur­ate tail­or­ing of stock hold­ings, after exec­ut­ives found the bene­fits did not out­weigh the costs.

The depart­ment estim­ates £130.5m was incurred on DSMS, although £12.2m of hard­ware was retained for future use, leav­ing £118.5m writ­ten off without the sys­tem ever see­ing the light of day.

As a res­ult of this they will be over­haul­ing their pro­ject and risk man­age­ment. Hmmm, yes that may be a good idea!