Vic Education spends millions to complete training system

Victoria’s Department of Education will spend millions more completing the state’s new training information system after it was forced to push back the system's planned go-live last year.

The department has been working to replace the existing custom-built skills Victoria training system (SVTS) with the new cloud-based Victorian training information system (VTIS) since early 2015.

NEC was awarded a $14 million contract in August 2016 to upgrade the current system, which is used by registered training organisations to submit monthly training activity data to the department and claim funding.

But last April the vendor informed the department it would not be able to meet the planned go-live date of September 2017 because of changes to the national reporting standard, which the new system would need to accommodate.

It has meant that Victorian training providers have been forced to continue using the state’s existing training system in the interim.

At the time the department said it would work with NEC on a revised delivery plan, and that it hoped to have the system in place during 2018.

It has now advised that the issues have been resolved and it expects the system to go live by the end of August this year.

However, the department has also revealed that it will need to fork out another $8.5 million to complete the rollout, bringing the total cost of the project to $24.3 million.

NEC’s contract has also climbed from an original value of $14 million to just over $17 million.

“After successfully resolving the issue raised in April 2017 where the vendor advised of being unable to meet the planned go live date the project has been re-baselined to a revised scope, schedule and cost after signing an amended contract on 23 November 2017,” an update on the state’s IT dashboard states.

The department said it would continue to meet regularly with the vendor over the next four months “to ensure the project is closely managed on a staged and controlled basis”.