HERMES without the weight: an IT project in a small municipality

Published 10 July 2026 · updated 16 August 2026

Consider a composite case. A municipality replaces its management software. The supplier promises to migrate the data in three weeks, and the executive approves. Fourteen months later the residents’ register still runs in parallel on the old system, and the bill has doubled without any formal decision behind it. The project didn’t derail for lack of competence. It derailed for lack of stopping points: nobody had planned a moment where the municipality could say no. That’s exactly what the HERMES milestones give you.

A public method, free, with no municipal obligation

HERMES is the Swiss Confederation’s project-management method, published as an open standard and free of licence fees. It frames federal projects and it also shows up in public-sector programmes and tenders. A municipality has to decide for itself whether the method applies, through the project or through its own rules. What follows is a governance tool, not a universal municipal obligation.

Five milestones, five chances to say no

I keep the gates that the risk and the mandate justify, and I drop the rest. A small municipal project doesn’t need the whole method to benefit from its decision points.

In its traditional approach, the current method uses five phases; the agile approach uses three. The important part is what separates the phases. A milestone isn’t simply a step in the calendar. It’s a decision: the authority that pays examines what has been produced and authorises the next phase’s spending, or doesn’t. For a municipal executive:

end of initiation: does the project deserve to exist, based on costed options rather than a single proposal
end of design: the municipality knows what it is buying before the first line gets written
end of realisation: the solution matches what was decided
deployment: the data migration worked, verified rather than hoped
closure: the documentation has been handed over and the contract closed

The municipality in the example didn’t need the whole method. The second milestone would have been enough.

HERMES One, for simple projects

A municipality of three thousand has neither a project office nor a steering committee on permanent standby. The method provides for that: HERMES One, whose official page is currently available in French, is a lighter variant for small projects. “Lighter” doesn’t mean you drop the decisions, the responsibilities or the evidence; keep what is proportionate to the risk and the engagement.

Three roles the municipality must keep distinct

Three roles carry a small project:

The sponsor: the authority that commissions the project and decides at the milestones. That authority is the municipal executive, and the role cannot be delegated.
The project manager: the person who steers the work and reports on it.
The user representative: the person who carries the functional responsibility. The person at the counter knows whether the software works, not the supplier.

Can the supplier that delivers also manage the project? It can legitimately manage its own delivery. But the municipality has to keep the sponsorship, the client-side governance, the acceptance and the milestone decisions. For a risky project, or for a municipality with no internal capacity, an independent project manager may reduce the conflicts of interest; that isn’t a universal requirement for every small engagement.

The link with public procurement

Initiation produces a described need, evaluated options and a cost estimated over the engagement’s full duration, which is precisely what decides the applicable procedure, as set out in the article on the legal framework of municipal engagements. A project framed before the tender doesn’t have to guess the procedure blindly.

The four documents to obtain before signing

The method doesn’t replace judgement, and a claim of “HERMES compatibility” doesn’t prove that a supplier can govern your project. Its contribution sits in what the initiation phase produces:

a review of the actual need
two or three costed options, including changing nothing
a risk and data-protection analysis
a total cost over the engagement’s duration, not per budget year

Four results proportionate to the size of the project. The time they take depends on the state of the data, the stakeholders, the options and the risks. That’s the visible cost of keeping the project under the authority that pays for it.

HERMES, and the scope of this adaptation

I checked the five gates against HERMES on 14 August 2026. The five gates in this article adapt HERMES to a simple municipal case. They don’t replace selecting the scenario, the roles and the results the real project requires.