No minuted meetings

Answers: while it's being built, where does it stand, and who can show it?

In 2001 Switzerland's Federal Tax Administration started INSIEME, a project to replace its old IT systems with one system for every kind of tax.^[1] In 2007, after an outside audit found that it would far exceed the time and money planned unless it changed substantially, the administration withdrew its award to its supplier and relaunched the project with the federal IT office as the builder.^[1] It ran until September 2012, when the head of the finance department stopped it. It had cost 115.9 million francs, and the department called that clearly out of proportion to its progress.^[1]

To oversee the relaunch, the administration set up a steering committee of 14 to 18 people at the end of April 2008. It was to watch the project's cost, dates and deliverables through the reports of the overall project head and the quality and risk controllers, and step in where needed.^[1] On 3 June 2008 it decided that a special project for a new value added tax law would come first, and gave it resources from inside the project.^[1] The Finance Committees and the Control Committees of the Swiss parliament, which later investigated INSIEME, found that decision did much to send the project off course, though they didn't put the whole responsibility on the steering committee.^[1] By the minutes parliament's committees were given, the steering committee met four times, the last at the end of 2008.^[1]

Its successor, an overall project committee, was formed in December 2009. For the year in between, parliament's committees found no minuted meeting of any project body at the top of the administration. The administration's IT board took up INSIEME at three of its meetings in that time.^[1] Meanwhile the monthly controlling reports went on, as they had since mid-2007, with quality and risk reports beside them.^[1] In the second half of 2009 the finance department's head of IT saw serious problems in the project. The department's leadership didn't give them the weight they needed and took no action.^[1]

Parliament's committees couldn't find out what the finance department's general secretariat knew of the project in that time. There were no minutes of project committee meetings for that year, and no standard reports reached the secretariat before mid-2010.^[1] In May 2013, given the state of the files, the committees gave up on a full review of them and worked from hearings and from documents they asked for one by one.^[1]

From 2010 management and quarterly reports were added to the monthly ones. "Evidently the shortage was not so much in their quantity," the committees wrote, "as in their quality, completeness and coherence."^[1] Of twenty project designs they analysed, two could be shown in writing to have followed HERMES, the method federal projects had been required to use since 1995.^[1]

They found that the tax administration's director had pushed to improve the reporting, though he couldn't make it meet his requirements.^[1] They didn't blame only the people who wrote the reports. The head of IT's finding showed, they wrote, that "a critical assessment of the project would have been possible" with the information there was. The people who receive reports, they added, have to keep asking until they get what they need.^[1] From October 2011 a new project head had the key documents written down, dated and signed by the people responsible for them.^[1]

The steering committee was set up to watch the project through its reports. The monthly reports were still being written through 2009, and the steering committee hadn't held a minuted meeting since the end of 2008.