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Understanding overall changes in delivery confidence to target engagement and reforms

Most (75.9%) of the 29 Tier 1 and 2 projects entering oversight since February 2024 report a High or Medium-High delivery confidence. These projects commonly report factors contributing to their delivery confidence rating at the start as: establishing effective governance early; having well-prepared documentation and artefacts; and ensuring experienced and capable personnel were ready.

This is an early sign that investment to strengthen digital project design processes is increasing overall delivery confidence. Projects often start with lower levels of delivery confidence, but the recent emphasis on ensuring mature planning is in place before projects start appears to be paying dividends, with more than three-quarters of these new projects entering oversight reporting High or Medium-High confidence. This contrasts with the United Kingdom where ‘it is not unusual for projects to be rated as Red earlier in their lifecycle, when scope, benefits, costs and delivery methods are still being explored’ (Infrastructure and Projects Authority 2024 p.13).

Reforms supporting success – partnering with industry to deliver digital projects

Recognising the crucial role of technology vendors in delivering the Australian Government’s ambitions for digital transformation, the Digital and ICT Investment Oversight Framework includes ‘sourcing’ as an area of focus. As part of this, the DTA coordinates marketplaces and agreements designed to enable agencies to easily access technology goods and services to support their digital projects. In 2023–24, the Australian Government sourced more than $6.4 billion of digital products and services from industry via these marketplaces and agreements. By accessing these arrangements through the BuyICT platform, agencies benefited from the Australian Government’s collective buying power and strengthened terms and conditions.

The DTA’s latest ICT labour hire and professional services panel, the Digital Marketplace Panel 2, adopts the APS Career Pathfinder dataset and Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) to classify ICT labour hire opportunities. The classification of roles and greater panel pricing transparency provides clearer signals for in-demand skills, their costs and potential shortages that will inform delivery capacity and confidence in digital projects. The top in-demand digital and ICT skills sourced by the APS include software engineer, solution architect and business analyst.