Code of conduct for good customer-supplier collaboration

30-11-2016

The National Council for IT Projects, DI Digital (a trade organisation within the Confederation of Danish Industry), the Danish IT Industry Association (ITB), Dansk IT (an association for IT professionals), selected IT suppliers and selected government authorities have joined forces to draw up a code of conduct to strengthen work to ensure successful collaboration in government IT projects.

Background

Today, core government services are supported digitally and focus on securing successful IT projects has moved higher up on the public-authority agenda. The National Council for IT Projects has also noted that collaboration and communication difficulties between customers and suppliers are often a problem in IT projects that go wrong. Therefore, the National Council for IT Projects has taken the initiative to set up a working group that has developed a number of principles on how to establish good collaboration between authorities and IT suppliers in government IT projects.

The principles have been developed in close collaboration between DI Digital, the Danish IT Industry Association (ITB) and Dansk IT on the basis of workshops and dialogue with a number of government authorities and private IT suppliers. For many years, both the public authorities and suppliers have built up an enormous amount of experience and a high degree of maturity in work to develop and implement new IT systems.

The principles therefore build on practical experience from government projects. The principles are generally aimed at IT projects of a certain size and complexity, but they can also be used as inspiration for smaller, simpler IT projects. Seven principles have been drawn up:

  1. The project and collaboration should extensively involve top management.
  2. There should be common goals and the project should aim at the most important business needs.
  3. The correct competences should be matched and present throughout the project.
  4. Governance and scope should be adapted to the nature of the project and discussed early on.
  5. Problems, challenges and risk analyses should be shared throughout the project period.
  6. Focus on transparency and openness should be maintained.
  7. There should be early and sustained dialogue.

Use

The objective of the principles is that they should provide inspiration to establish good collaboration between customers and suppliers, even if there are conflicting interests between customers and suppliers in IT projects. Good collaboration requires that customers and suppliers keep focus on the common goal: A successful project completed within the given framework and requirements, including a solid and realistic business case.

Download the code of conduct for good customer-supplier collaboration in Pdf format here, and read more about the principles (in Danish)

For more information:

Read more about the IT Council and its work here