Ken Livingstone offers tips on IT projects

Ken advised firms to take risks

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone dished out transformation tips to IT professionals at this week's SAP World Tour 2008 at London's Wembley Stadium.

Although Livingstone appeared to lack in-depth SAP knowledge, he used the transformation experience gained from developments such as the Congestion Charge and the Oyster card to educate attendees on how to lead large-scale change.

The following is vnunet.com's step-by-step guide to IT project management, Ken-style.

Face up to the problem at hand
Livingstone explained why he had to bring in the London congestion charge: "We had an infrastructure under a lot of strain and this was mixed with a growing population so we had to move rapidly."

Look at the facts
"London automobiles were moving at 12 miles per hour when Edward Heath was prime minister in the 1970s, and by the time I came in traffic had slowed the movement to nine miles per hour," he said.

Take a risk
Livingstone advised SAP attendees against taking a cautious approach to change: "One of the reasons why politicians fail is that they are too risk-averse. People want mayors who take risks, just like businesses should take risks [to innovate] before some other bugger beats them to it."

Stay in touch with your users
Livingstone pointed to the use of polls as a good way to stay in touch with users when initiating change: "When we were planning the Congestion Charge, we did monthly polling to find out how many people wanted me to die immediately and how many people were prepared to wait a while."

Use good judgement
Livingstone advised SAP attendees not to prioritise poll results over their better judgement, however: "Our job is not to be the followers of opinion but to be in touch with the brightest minds out there, have the latest data to hand and understand the trends."

Prepare to be hated and stick to your guns
"Politicians need to make a decision and stick to it. Sadly there are too many politicians who just want to be loved. A lot of them have had sad childhoods, but they will not be successful if they follow the crowd," said Livingstone.

Be cautious with contracts and get the right people to negotiate the clauses
Livingstone spoke of the difficulty he had in securing a contract with Capita for the London Oyster card. "Warning: when you deal with Capita, they can have your bloody arm off," he said, explaining that he had to get some outsiders in from the US to negotiate the Oyster card conditions.

"They negotiated the contract so well that Capita actually lost money in the beginning period of the Congestion Charge and we had to renegotiate the conditions.

"Compare this to our Civil Service negotiating contacts. They would have never been able to do this. Instead they would have asked: 'How much?'"

Prepare to be aggressive to get what you want
Livingstone said it had been difficult getting buy-in from Capita on expanding Oyster cards to the whole of London: "So I went to Moscow and found out about transferring their system to London and terminating the Oyster contract we had already signed. Capita agreed to expand the system because of the threat of losing the deal."