30 January 2006 | Rebecca Ellinor

The Office of Government Commerce is to step up its scrutiny of large Whitehall IT projects to ensure they come in on time and on budget.

As part of this increased monitoring, the OGC will require that each project is checked at agreed milestones, committing departments to Gateway reviews at specified points.

It began piloting the approach last summer and told supplymanagement.com it is now rolling it out to the "most important mission critical programmes and projects".

The OGC has taken the action in order to address criticisms in a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report examining the use of the Gateway reviews in IT projects.

The reviews are designed to check budgetary and deadline adherence of large schemes and are mandatory for high and medium risk projects. But the PAC a report last summer found a third of 254 high risk IT projects were not checked according to OGC six-step Gateway procedure.

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