Category Archives: Campaign4Change

Standish Group: the role of the executive sponsor in IT projects

Posted on 30/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The US-based Standish Group has published a series of excellent pieces on its blog over the last few days over the role of the executive sponsor in IT projects.

The blog features an interview with Eugene Bounds, senior vice-president at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Bounds says, “I was first reached by the then current executive sponsor of a project called “RightIT.”  RightIT helps organisations optimise their IT investments.  The project combined the capabilities of IT, PM and cost.  He had the expertise in IT and he wanted my expertise in programme management and finance.  I eventually became the executive sponsor for the RightITTM project. 

“The first thing I did was to establish frequent and standard meetings; so, every Friday we had a team meeting.  My commitment is to be available for guidance and status reviews.”

Bounds adds, “As executive sponsor of the RightIT project, I thought it was critical to understand who on the leadership team would be affected or could gain benefit from the RightIT project.  I then reached out to these colleagues to establish an advisory group. 

“As part of the advisory group, I established monthly meetings.  This gave me an opportunity to get direct stakeholder feedback and support.  If we were producing an artifact, I wanted their thoughts on it to make it better.  I wanted to make it packaged and ready to go.  Of all the things I did as an executive sponsor, this was the most important.”

“The problem is that project managers have their own view and language.  The project manager looks at the project tactically.  He or she looks more in the weeds of the project or the details to try to get it done.  The executive sponsor tends to look at it as a strategic event.  He or she will look at the project on how it aligns with the goals of the organisation. 

“In the project management profession we have our own language and plenty of acronyms.  So there is a gap and it really is up to the project manager to fill the gap.  We cannot expect the executive sponsor to understand the PMBOK (project management body of knowledge) and all of its artifacts and processes.  It is up to the project manager to make that translation.  Executive sponsors on the other hand have the responsibility to ensure that the project manager makes that translation.”

The Standish Group points out that the executive sponsor is “the owner of the project. As the owner of the project, the full weight and responsibilities of the success or failure of the project falls squarely on his or her shoulders. The executive sponsor, for better or worse, owns the outcome. The executive sponsor has no right to abdicate his or her executive responsibility. He or she cannot blame the project manager, the IT executives, users, stakeholders, reluctant peers, vendors, or software developers.

“The sole responsibility for a successful outcome rests on the shoulders of the executive sponsor.  The sponsor may not be an executive of the organisation, but he or she is the chief executive of the project. The word ‘executive’ symbolises a higher level of responsibility. It is more powerful than just ‘sponsor.'”

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, IT projects

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How do you create successful software development teams? (Part 1)

Posted on 29/03/2012 | 1 comment

By David Bicknell

Campaign4Change recently took part in a software development roundtable organised by the Dutch software specialist Software Improvement Group (SIG) to find what makes successful teams in software development.

The roundtable featured two specialists in creating specialist teams: Andrew de la Haye, chief operating officer, at RIPE Network Co-ordination Centre (RIPE NCC), one of five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) providing Internet resource allocations, registration services and coordination activities that support the operation of the Internet globally; and author and management expert Kevan Hall, chief executive of Global Integration.

The event discussed the process in the creation of excellent teams in software development, the qualities shared by successful teams, the role that management plays in their creation, while highighting some of the factors that help create productive teams, and the issues faced by the people managing them. 

Teamwork

Arguably, great development teams typically demonstrate a lot of very tight teamwork, with small groups that all know and understand each other working intensively together.

According to Andrew de la Haye, what makes effective teams  is a mix of  strategy, team dynamics, communication, and multifunctional commitment.

“Clarity on the company’s strategy is extremely important in creating an effective team. Very high level strrategies are very difficult to comprehend in regards to the work. Communication is very important: it is the alignment between what we say and what we do. We have to reinforce and embody the goals we have,” says de la Haye.

“Where I used to work, people might say ‘We were going to the factory today. And that meant the developers sitting in a big room. But the word factory is a bit misleading. These guys are not blue-collar workers. They are highly educated and they are much more intelligent than I am. They are intelligent individuals with lots of ideas, which I want to nourish.

Agile Empowerment

“With communication in mind, what we are also doing is lots of measurement and making it very visible,” says de la Haye. “For example in our room, I have a chart showing the quality of our software  to the team, showing how they’re doing. That contributes to the notion of quality and effectiveness in the team.

“Then there are the dynamics of the group. We use Agile development, which means that we deliver every second week to the business side. The business side may say, ‘We don’t like the feature. We don’t like the colour.’ I don’t care what they say as long as what we produce fits their needs. And because the iterations are very short, it’s very easy to change it.

“Another key factor is empowerment of the team with Scrum. We have a huge board with sticky notes and colours. It might say that a particular feature is required, at a very high level. And then they decide who’s doing what. I’m not even part of that discussion. These guys are very bright and know what they’re good at. I do have some control mechanisms in place. We measure quality and I measure the amount of what they deliver. I don’t ask my developers, ‘Can you tell me how many hours you were working?’ because they are not very good at predicting the amount of hours. But what they are very good at is predicting the complexity based on complexity points. And the complexity points tell me how much time something will take.

“I had this phrase, ‘Quality is cheap,’ and I had some arguments with people over its meaning. What is says that ‘If you do really really good work, the rework that you have to do, which is really more than doing it properly in the first instance, you will be able to reduce that rework.’ And that has to be reinforced. If we hire people, we hire people who like quality and are quality driven and that’s very important as well.

Commitment to quality

“We have multidisciplinary teams. And we have expertise areas, but we don’t have experts. An expert is someone you put on a pedestal and nurture. Someone with an expertise area is willing to broaden that knowledge but also is able to pick up other knowledge. In the Scrum team, we have developers and senior developers. That’s it – no architects, senior architects, enterprise architects. And a healthy turnover is very important as well. For us, it’s about 10-15%. You need new blood in your team once in a while. We are not consultants, so we are not doing cutting edge stuff. But we’re not lagging behind either. So you need to replenish your team with the knowledge that’s available, and that’s very important to the team.

“The final area is the commitment. If you have all these areas well in place, you have a team that is very committed. Committed to quality; committed to our overall goals as a company. They all understand why our company is there. And it’s not to make money. They are empowered and result-oriented. And one of the things that gets me lots of credit is that I give them lots of learning opportunities. We have a budget for our developers  and what we used to do was send them away to the US, to California to a conference, that kind of stuff. And the value that came back was not that much. They may have had a great time, but that’s not the commitment I’m looking for.

“So now I say, ‘Take two weeks in the office. Come in whenever you like. Leave whenever you like and do something you think is interesting for yourself. And after those two weeks, show the team what you have been doing. Hopefully it’s innovative and hopefully people learn from it. It’s not something we need to apply. We might; we might not. But it should be a learning experience for you.’

“At RIPE NCC, we’re not top heavy on mobile applications. And it’s not an area that we need to go into. But we had this guy whose ambition is to work for a mobile operator in a couple of years’ time. And so he created a mobile app for us. I’m not scared of losing him because I expect that turnover anyway. The guy is very committed to his job because I take him very seriously. I help him get to the next level. So he might stay for the next six months and if I really need him he will come back. It’s all about collaboration with my teams.

“My strategy director said ‘I keep going to these strategy conferences and I’ll see the same people the same time over and over again. And they tell me stuff that I already know about because of publications etc, and there’s not much value.’ So then he went to a conference for surgeons which he admitted was way beyond his league. And he said it was so interesting to see this different world, that he actually took away more from a conference with surgeons than those strategy meetings he went to for years and years. And that gave me the idea of just letting these people do what they want to do. It’s not a done deal that they have to spend their two weeks in-house. But most of them do. It’s not that we don’t send them to conferences. I might send them anyway.

“There is a correlation between value delivered and the commitment to what they do and feeling part of what they deliver in Agile development. They have these regular check-ups with the busines and it’s very nice if you build something for two weeks and ou present it to a business person and they are sitting there with a big smile on their face, because he has exactly what he wanted and he never had that before. There is a correlation between happiness, commitment and Agile development.”

SIG pointed that three of its clients which all delivered four or five star software quality had followed a Scrum-like approach or had adopted Agile principles. Scrum teams tend to be more cohesive because they are empowered: they have to do it themselves. They decide amongst themselves what to do to deliver the right product.

Remote working or co-location

In contrast to other IT working environments, there is little or no remote working in RIPE NCC’s software development, says Haye.

“We have everyone here in one environment, which helps create some trust, and understand who in the team does what. Then once they understood each other, then perhaps there’s some leeway for remote working.But first they had to establish the trust.”

“I think it depends what type of work you do,” says Kevan Hall. “I’m a big corporate person.  The only area where I see the big global multinationals moving back to co-location is in very intensive R&D groups, such as the auto industry, because they seem to be unable to manage distributed R&D. One of the big challenges in distributed research teams is serendipity. It’s the bouncing off and the ideas and those kinds of things.  You can do that when you get people together and you can to a certain extent do it through a conference call, and videoconferencing and WebEx and things like that.

“But even in an open-plan office, if you look at how far apart people’s desks are, that affects how often they just spontaneously talk. Anything up to ten metres, you talk. Anything beyond ten metres, forget it.”

Too much teamwork

“It may be shocking, but I actually spend quite a bit of my time trying to discourage teamwork, because one of the things in the kind of organisation that is distributed or  global is that teamwork is really expensive.  It requires people to be accessible in the same time, if not the same place. and for global teams, there isn’t a right time to do that. It’s also very expensive.

“So when the cost of something goes up, the demand for it should come down. But because we’ve got this almost unthinking attachment to teams for everything, it hasn’t. And when we ask people how they’re spending their time, they tell us they’re spending two days a week in meetings, and they get 60 emails a day, 85% of which is irrelevant. We’re just sharing too much stuff.

“I used to be in manufacturing and if somebody told me we were producing 50% scrap, we’d have had a really sharp discussion about the future of that factory.  But we routinely accept 50% waste in collaboration. We have to be much more selective about when we use teams.”

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How the Government plans to ensure IT projects have a lifetime cost of under £100m

Posted on 29/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Government has issued a Procurement Policy Note that sets out its thinking behind the policy that individual ICT contracts or projects should have a lifetime cost of less than £100m.

It says the £100m limit will apply to all future ICT projects, “unless a strong case can be made that doing so increases the overall cost to the taxpayer, notably increases the risk of failure or increases the security threat to the public body or Government as a whole.”

It adds that in future, “government IT contracts will be more flexible, starting with two areas (application software and infrastructure IT). The Government is introducing set breakpoints in IT contracts so there is less money locked into large lengthy contracts. The Government will look to disaggregate future contracts and deliver more flexible, cheaper solutions. This opens up opportunities for SMEs and reduces the cost to taxpayers.”

Its guidance, which takes effect from 1st April, applies to all central government departments, their agencies and non departmental public bodies and is particularly intended for those with a purchasing role.

In background notes, the briefing says:

  • The £100m threshold relates to all ICT contracts or projects where the total value over the life of the contract exceeds £100m regardless of how the contract is funded. It includes frameworks as well as individual call offs from frameworks. A case may be made for exemption from this policy on the grounds of national security or continuity of a critical Government service.

Based on this, the policy aims are as follows:

  • To reduce the risk of single supplier failure within a large project;
  • To increase competition and innovation by enabling more suppliers to bid and take part in projects, thereby increasing value to the taxpayer;
  • To procure contracts in a way which ensures maximum possible benefit to the maximum number of parties – for example, ensuring that infrastructure/services which are procured can be used by more than one department.

In a foreword, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude says:

“The Government believes that business is the driver of economic growth and innovation, and that we need to take urgent action to boost enterprise and build a new and more responsible economic model. We want to create a fairer and more balanced economy, where we are not so dependent on a narrow range of economic sectors, and where new businesses and economic opportunities are more evenly shared between regions and industries. This guidance is founded on a desire to minimise the risk around high value contracts and ensure that Government always seeks the best possible value for money when procuring large ICT contracts.

“In the Coalition Programme the Government made a commitment to promote small business procurement in particular by introducing an aspiration that 25% of government contracts should be awarded to small and medium sized businesses. To deliver this aspiration the Prime Minister and The Minister for the Cabinet Office announced, on the 11th February 2011, a far reaching package of measures to open up public procurement to small and medium sized enterprises. The Government ICT Strategy, published at the end of March 2011 outlined a new approach to ICT procurement that improves contract delivery timelines and reduces the risk of project failure, enables greater use of SMEs, a much shorter timescale and lower costs to all parties.

“We will end the practice of attempting to cover every requirement in great detail and cover every legal eventuality in every project and contract, thereby increasing the procurement cost and timescales to all parties to unacceptable levels. We will do this by focusing on the 80/20 rule, simplifying to the core components of the requirements at every level and at every stage of a project.

On SMEs, G-Cloud and Open Systems, the policy note says procurement will:

  • Ensure value for money, competition and innovation by ensuring that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are freely able to bid. Ensuring that any procurement process we use does not unnecessarily exclude them due to price, risk or resource associated with bidding activity. This includes reviewing our criteria and evidence required as part of the contract award process for items that might be relevant to a large company only. However, SMEs will be treated no differently in evaluation of capability, financial stability, or their ability to provide ongoing support, etc.
  • Ensure visibility of innovation and encourage mass purchasing of solutions available from both within the public sector and the private sector by creating a quality assured Government Cloud based procurement vehicle for Government, which enables all sizes of organisations to showcase their products, services, solutions etc. This service would also enable government to market and sell any unwanted assets it might own.
  • Encourage and maximise the use of Open Source/Open Standards whenever possible and where it represents a value for money solution, allowing department to re-use code, designs, templates etc. ensuring that work is not duplicated.

Comment

The Government’s aspiration to have individual ICT contracts or projects with a lifetime cost of less than £100m is a worthy one. But the proof of the pudding, as always, is in the eating. And we haven’t seen the pudding yet.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud, G-Cloud, government, Government IT, IT projects, open source, SME

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Rights to Provide plans focus on “potential offered by mutual models” to improve services

Posted on 29/03/2012 | 1 comment

By David Bicknell

The Government has detailed how it is developing and implementing Rights to Provide to “empower front line staff across the public sector to take over the services they deliver,” possibly through the creation of new mutuals.

The Government said it has identified local authorities’ services, fire services, probation and adult social care as some of the areas for developing new mutuals. This it says, will be backed by enhanced support available to staff through the Mutuals Information Service and the Mutuals Support Programme.

In announcing an updated discussion paper David Cameron said increasing parental choice in schools, extending personal budgets so people can choose how they spend money on services and increasing the transparency of public service performance and user satisfaction are all part of the next steps to improve public services by opening them up.  The paper updates the Open Public Service (OPS) White Paper published last summer.

Launching the new paper, Cameron said: “Nearly two years on from coming into office, brick by brick, edifice by edifice, we are slowly dismantling the big-state structures we inherited from the last government. We are putting people in control, giving them the choices and chances that they get in almost every other area of life. There is still a way to go and this kind of change will not happen overnight. But no one should doubt my determination to make our public services better, by opening them up.”

Specifically on mutuals, the paper says:

“Alongside the focus on digital delivery, and as a core part of work to reform the Civil Service, Government Commercial Teams are working with individual departments to identify where new commercial models would accelerate reform and improve services. In some cases, this may involve high-quality in-house delivery; in other cases outsourcing may offer best value.

“We are particularly interested in the potential offered by mutual models, including mutual joint ventures, that give employees much greater say in the way their organisation is run, for example the model being considered for MyCSP.

“To ensure that the benefits of mutualisation are available across the wider public sector, we are giving public sector staff new Rights to Provide – empowering employees to form public service mutuals to bid or request to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector staff to become their own boss,freeing up untapped entrepreneurial and innovative drive.

“Public service mutuals are now well established in community healthcare, with thousands of public servants working in new mutuals with contracts worth almost £1 billion. We have extended these rights to new areas, including adult social care and NHS trusts, and we are looking to go further, in areas such as youth services, probation services, children’s centres, and fire and rescue services.

“We have been actively working with fledgling mutuals on the ground, for example through the Mystery Shopper service and the Mutuals Information Service; and we are supporting some of the most promising and innovative mutuals to reach the point of investment readiness, through the Mutuals Support Programme – a fund of more than £10 million to contract for support in the form of business and professional services to groups of staff who want to form mutuals or existing mutual organisations in the public sector. A steady stream of applications is developing into a pipeline of projects.”

The Government said all its departments will put in place a Right to Provide to empower employees in public services for which they are responsible to s pin out to create new public service mutuals. Public sector workers who want to formmutuals or co-operatives to deliver public services will be given a Right to Provide.

The Government will look to reflect these commitments in departmental business plans where appropriate.

Information from the Mutuals Information Service will inform departmental policy development, the new paper says.  

It points out that “the Department of Health’s Right to Request is near completion, with 40 services now operating as independent social enterprises and further projects to go live by April 2012. The Right to Provide has generated interest across NHS trusts, foundation trusts and adult social care.

“The Department of Health is already exploring opportunities to support social enterprises and mutuals spinning out from the NHS, social care and adult social work. The status of other government departments is as follows:

• Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Further Education – now starting

• Home Office – not yet started

• Ministry of Justice – now starting; commitments will be reflected in the Department’s business plan 

• Department for Work and Pensions – not yet started

•Department for Education Youth Services, and Social Work – now starting

• Department for Education Children’s Centres – not yet started.

Other Links

Cabinet Office news release

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Posted in Campaign4Change, managing outsourced services, mutualisation, mutuals, procurement, social economy, social enterprise

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Millions of pounds of secret DWP reports

Posted on 29/03/2012 | 10 comments

By Tony Collins

The Department for Work and Pensions is keeping secret – as a matter of course – millions of pounds worth of reports it has commissioned on a wide range of IT and other projects including Universal Credit.

A DWP spokesperson, confirming that all the reports (below) are not published, told Campaign4Change that the reports have limited distribution after commitments and assurances were given to their “authors”.

These authors include Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Capgemini, KPMG, Gartner, McKinsey, Atkins, Tribal, Compass and IBM.

In the past, when the DWP has told the Information Commissioner that reports needed to be kept confidential because of commitments to suppliers, the Commissioner has found that the suppliers were content to have the reports published.

A spokesman for the DWP told us: “Consultants’ reports provide additional, often expert, information for the DWP to consider and have a limited distribution following commitments and assurances on disclosure with the authors.”

Lack of accountability

While the reports remain hidden the companies producing them will remain unaccountable for their contents. In our view the excessive and automatic secrecy brings a risk that taxpayers will end up paying millions of pounds for consultancy reports that tell the DWP what it wants to hear.

Would a consultancy be re-hired if its reports were sharply critical of the DWP and its projects?

And is the DWP’s instinctive secrecy appropriate in an era of so-called open government? The reports are not about Britain’s nuclear secrets. In the case of Universal Credit, reports on the progress or otherwise of the programme could be of interest to thousands of people whose benefits will be affected by the scheme.

We believe the DWP should be open by default, but will that ever happen? Epsom MP Chris Grayling is the current DWP minister responsible for the secret reports.

The reports

Below is a list of some of the unpublished consultancy reports produced for the DWP in 2010 and 2011:

Contract title Supplier Value (£)
Resource Management IT Healthcheck NSG 90,000
Jobcentre Plus Financial Information System Capability Review Capgemini 25,000
Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Plan Atkins 25,000
Undertake a Review of Data Centre Migration Approach PricewaterhouseCoopers 20,000
Organisational Design Project Deloitte 543,000
Developing a Business Intelligence Operating Model Deloitte 185,672
CIT Software Project Discovery Phase Deloitte 195,528
Support to CIT Improvement Programmes Tribal 760,000
Information Security Assurance Project Atkins 49,950
Assistance with Resource Management System Improvement Plan   Programme Phase 2 Atkins 72,690
Office for Disability Issues TrailBlazer Support—Housing Sitra 51,300
Office for Disability Issues—Trailblazer Resource Allocation for   Work Choice In-Control 11,750
Call Off Framework Agreement for Right to Control TrailBlazers PricewaterhouseCoopers 97,902
Commercial Assurance—Automated Delivery Service—Jobseekers   Allowance Atkins 47,300
Corporate Services Division Cost Optimisation Programme Network   and Telephony Xantus 94,370
National Registration Authority Audit (tScheme Audit) KPMG 10,727
Shingo Prize Pilot The Manufacturing   Institute—TMI Pract. Services 11,000
Business Control Strategic Improvements PricewaterhouseCoopers 750,000
A review of DWP Vendor Management Activities Procurement   Excellence 52,250
Assistance with Resource Management System Improvement Plan   Programme Phase 3 Atkins 94,050
Pension Reform Delivery Programme Closure Activity PricewaterhouseCoopers 100,000
Benchmarking Hosting Services Gartner 23,456
Application Delivery Centre (ADC) Validation Services Requests Atkins 97,500
Additional Modelling Support for Dynamic Benefits Oliver Wyman 19,500
Strategic Financial Consultancy Support to Help deliver Work   Programme KPMG 362,000
Shared Services Resource   Management Contract (RMOC) Benchmarking Compass 15,000
Final   assurance of DWP IT Strategy Capgemini 20,000
Research   into the Capacity of the Health Care Professional Market Deloitte 48,678
Commercial   support to the Work Programme Richard   Aitken-Davies 45,000
Support   to DWP Finance and Commercial Function (Organisation Design Review) PricewaterhouseCoopers 20,000
Support   to DWP CJT Cost Reduction Programme Bramble 1,065,000
DWP   Shared Services Delivery Model Options appraisal Deloitte 225,000
Benchmarking   of DWP Shared Services PricewaterhouseCoopers 19,000
Universal   Credit Delivery Model Assessment Phase 2 McKinsey and Partners 350,000
Universal   Credit Strategic Support Capgemini 505,000
Review   of Transforming Letters Project Deloitte 19,550
Application   Delivery Project Independent Market Assessment Compass 19,000
Universal   Credit End to End Technical Review IBM 49,240
Digital   Customer Total Experience Design Requirement Deloitte 16,667
Universal   Credit Supplier Workshop-Facilitation Xantus 11,399
Consultancy   Support to develop Flexible New Deal Exit Strategy KPMG 12,000
Support   of CIT Improvement Initiatives KPMG 250,000
Risk   Assurance Division Strategic Partner PricewaterhouseCoopers 1,000,000
Benchmarking   of the HPES Hosting Contract Compass 172,105
Compensating   People with Occupational Mesothelioma Deloitte 25,616
Specialist   tScheme Annual Audit of DWPs National Registration Authority KPMG 33,000

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Deloitte, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, IBM, openness and transparency, Politics, Universal Credit

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Mutuals likely to be focus of Government Right to Provide plans expected today

Posted on 29/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The Government looks set to make an announcement about mutuals today as part of ‘Right to Provide’ plans due to be unveiled by David Cameron. The likelihood of an announcement appears to have been leaked.

Here’s today’s Daily Mail’s take on the proposed announcement.

More details to follow

Updated: Rights to Provide Plans focus on “potential offered by mutual models”

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Posted in Campaign4Change, mutualisation, mutuals, procurement, public sector, public services

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Coalition responds to Administration committee’s “Recipe for rip-offs” criticism of Government IT

Posted on 28/03/2012 | 2 comments

By David Bicknell 

The Coalition has responded to the Public Administration Committee’s January follow up to its report  “Government and IT – “A recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach” which was published in July 2011. 

In a Memorandum to the Committee, the Government said it welcomed its interest in and support for government Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It insisted that “ICT is vital for the delivery of efficient, cost-effective public services which are responsive to the needs of citizens and businesses.

“The Government’s ICT Strategy set out how the Government ICT landscape would change over the current spending review period, and included 30 actions which form the foundation activities for achieving the Strategy’s core objectives of: reducing waste and project failure, and stimulating economic growth; creating a common ICT infrastructure; using ICT to enable and deliver change; and strengthening governance.”

It its responses to the Committee’s recommendations, the Government said the following:

Oligopoly of large suppliers and benchmarking

Committee Recommendation:

The Cabinet Office’s commitment to benchmarking through transparent data, as outlined in the Government’s response, will help to quantify the gap between high and low cost products and services, but without the independent external advice which we recommended to identify reliable cost comparisons, the overall outcome will not change, and the Government will not achieve its cost reduction agenda.

Government Response:

Government is committed to creating a fairer, more competitive and open marketplace from which it buys its ICT services and solutions. Government is in the process of breaking the contractual lock-in which places the majority of government ICT business with a small group of major systems integrators.

This process will remove exclusivity from the contracts, and rigorously record every contractual breach. It will also gather data centrally on the performance and pricing of all suppliers to provide a consolidated view of their competitiveness and performance.

In parallel, Government is consulting on new frameworks that will enable more agile procurement, and open the market to more Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Some existing frameworks are not in alignment with government policy, and are limited to existing large suppliers.

These frameworks will be deprecated in favour of new frameworks that support re-introducing greater competition into the provision of ICT goods and services. Doing so will remove the current advantage enjoyed by the existing large supplier base in order to re-establish a truly level playing field.

The recent work to restructure the current ASPIRE contract demonstrates how government is working to ensure better value for taxpayers, break up large contracts and create opportunities for new, smaller companies to enter the market.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and the Cabinet Office negotiated with the IT supplier, Capgemini, to deliver a significant restructure of the current ASPIRE contract and savings for HMRC. The new deal reached will lead to a diverse supply chain with transparent pricing (removal of the current exclusivity agreement), open choice for HMRC and significantly enhanced value for money. By 2017 the new deal will help deliver:

  • Cost savings: £200 million saved by paying less per unit of IT services provided and potential for further savings by open competition, volume reductions and direct relationships between HMRC and subcontractors;
  • More freedom: HMRC will now have more control to run open competitions for its IT needs, enabling more opportunities for innovative SME suppliers and greater control over the volume of work going through the contract;
  • Greater transparency: transparency in pricing is enhanced further to assist with value for money comparisons; and
  • Future Model – a future model that breaks lock-ins and gives HMRC the flexibility and control to drive its own savings and innovation.

Government is working to improve the quality of its ICT management information. One example of substantive progress is the recent G-Cloud framework which requires all suppliers to openly publish full details of their pricing (see http://www.govstore.net/).

In addition to this transparency, the pricing levels achieved for provision of these services are being used as benchmarks against which incumbent suppliers are being measured. Government expects all supplier costs to be reduced to match or better these benchmarks, producing substantial cost reductions.

A project is also beginning to gather information on contracts data for all current ICT suppliers and departmental benchmarking of ICT unit price data. The unit price benchmarking will build on a tool established within HMRC which, following a year of use, provided HMRC with a detailed breakdown of costs relating to IT and helped the department realise many benefits including £24m savings and a 30% reduction in the number of confidential desktops.

The National Audit Office has recommended that the tool be rolled out further across government. This project will provide the opportunity to benchmark across government, and also enable external independent reviews to measure comparability with private sector peers.

The Government’s intention is also to publish as much of this data for public scrutiny as possible. It is looking to embed this approach in its handling of all its large suppliers, including software developers.

The Government will also shortly be announcing a new memorandum of understanding with Oracle that will show how its new, commercially aware, intelligent customer approach will deliver financial and significant operational benefits.

Legacy systems

Committee Recommendation:

We are not convinced that the Government‘s approach to legacy systems properly addresses the underlying issues. At the very least, the Government should produce a long term risk-register identifying where and when investment will be needed to migrate and replace existing legacy systems.

Government Response:

The Government has recognised the challenge it faces in delivering services with both new and older systems. It is right to ensure that departments have a range of credible options regarding the choices they make about their legacy systems. Different circumstances will require different options.

Departments, which understand in detail both the business functions provided by their systems and the technical constraints that act upon them, are best placed to determine the appropriate option. All departments will be producing plans to show how their systems will conform over time to the Government’s ICT Strategy principles, objectives and standards. These will be subject to challenge and co-ordination to ensure that they result in a viable plan for Government as a whole.

All major commitments to expenditure, whether in “wrapping” legacy systems to enable their continued use or in implementing new systems to provide the necessary business functions, will be subject to appropriate spending controls and approvals.

Assessments at this stage will take account of relevant factors including value, cost, budgetary constraints and risk.

Capability within Government

Committee Recommendation:

We welcome and endorse the Government’s acknowledgement of the need to grow its capacity in commercial skills of procuring and managing contracts, not just technical IT skills, in order to become an ‘intelligent customer’. Specific training for the Senior Civil Service in technology policy will also be welcome, as will the growth of a network of ‘champions’ of agile development. However, it is not clear from the Government’s response to our report that its actions will be adequate to cope with the scale of behavioural and process change required across the whole of Government, nor that the agile ‘champions’ will have sufficient seniority, expertise or support.

Government Response:

The Government recognises that raising commissioning and procurement skills is vitally important to get better outcomes for the taxpayer and to stimulate growth through public procurements, including greater use of SMEs.

It has already developed new LEAN standard operating procedures for central government underpinned by training available for all civil servants. It is now working on similar improvements for contract and supplier management and commissioning.

The Cabinet Office has also been piloting a two-way commercial interchange programme with industry to bring private sector expertise into Government. Civil Service Learning (CSL) is currently developing a suite of training on commercial awareness which will be available to all Civil Servants via the CSL portal in spring/summer 2012.

In parallel, the Government is determined to return world-class Project Leadership capability to Whitehall to improve the delivery of the Government’s £400 billion portfolio of Major Projects, which includes ICT projects.

In order to achieve this, the Major Projects Authority has established the UK Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA), in partnership with Oxford Saïd Business School, to target the SROs and Project Directors leading the Government’s Portfolio. The key focus of the MPLA will be on leadership, business acumen and commercial expertise from both an academic and practical angle and will include lessons learned from previous major projects including ICT projects.

Part of the Academy programme will involve an assessment of capability and previous experience of Project Leaders, with a tailored development plan designed for each individual. This will ensure that there is a clear picture of the capability within the Civil Service and inform decisions of where to best deploy their expertise.

The Government fully recognises the point that Agile “champions” may not have sufficient seniority, expertise or support and are working on identifying and putting in place senior Agile Leads within departments to drive and embed the behavioural and process change required to make this a success.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, government, Government IT

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CIO behind FBI’s Agile-developed Sentinel IT project to leave his post

Posted on 28/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

The US CIO behind one of the world’s highest profile public sector Agile IT projects is to leave his post and return to the private sector.

Chad Fulgham, CIO at the FBI will leave next month having overseen the creation of the FBI’s Sentinel case management system. Sentinel replaces the FBI’s outdated Automated Case Support system, with the hope that it will transform the way the FBI does business by moving it from a primarily paper-based case management system to an electronic work flow-based management system of record with enhanced data sharing capabilities.

“When I was hired as the CIO, it was understood Sentinel was going to be one of my top priorities,” said Fulgham. “Today, I can tell you the software coding is done, the new hardware is in place, and it has been quite impressive during initial performance testing. We have trained hundreds of FBI special agents and employees, and it will have a lasting impact on this organisation.”

In a press release announcing Fulgham’s departure, the FBI said that “using a progressive Agile software development methodology, partnering with industry, and employing an aggressive deployment schedule, Sentinel is scheduled to be implemented in summer of 2012.”

The US Inspector General recently issued a report into the use of Agile in the Sentinel project. You can read the report here

The US magazine Information Week has also covered the story

Lifting the lid on Agile within a public sector IT project

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, CIO, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT projects

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Universal Credit: who’ll be responsible if it goes wrong?

Posted on 27/03/2012 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

When asked whether Universal Credit will work, be on budget and on time, Ian Watmore, Permanent Secretary, Cabinet Office, gave a deft reply. He told Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke on 13 March 2012:

“From where I sit today, I think all the signs are very positive. I am never going to predict that something is going to be on time and on budget until it is.”

If the plans do not fall into place who, if anyone, will be responsible? In theory it’ll be Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. But as Watmore told the Public Administration Committee, there are several other organisations involved. Although the DWP and HMRC are building the IT systems, the success of Universal Credit also relies on local authorities, which are overseen by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

There are also the Cabinet Office and the Treasury whose officials seek to “ensure that what is going on is appropriate” said Watmore.

If Univeral Credit goes awry all the departments may be able to blame the private sector: the employers that must pass PAYE information to HMRC so that the Revenue’s Real-Time Information element of Universal Credit can work.

David Gauke is the minister responsible for HMRC so would he take some of the blame if Real-Time Information didn’t work, or was not on budget, or was delayed?

Or would the main IT suppliers Accenture and IBM take any of the blame? Highly unlikely, whatever the circumstances.

There is also a dependency on the banks.

But nothing is wrong … is it?

All those putatively responsible for Universal Credit continue to say that all is going well.

Duncan Smith told the House of Commons on 5 March 2012:

“We are making good progress towards the delivery of universal credit in 2013, and I have fortnightly progress meetings with officials and weekly reports from my office. I also chair the universal credit senior sponsorship group, which brings together all Government Departments and agencies that are relevant to the delivery of universal credit.

“Design work is well under way and is being continually tested with staff and claimants, and the development of the necessary IT systems will continue in parallel.”

He said that universal credit will reduce complexity by putting together all the benefits that are relevant to people going back to work – though benefit systems that are not relevant to the coalition’s “Work programme” will not be included in the DWP’s Universal Credit IT consolidation.

To reduce risks Universal Credit will be phased in over four years from October 2013, each stage bringing in a different group of claimants.

But …

Campaign4Change has asked the DWP to publish its various reports on the progress of Universal Credit and it has refused, even under the Freedom of Information Act. It seems the DWP’s secretiveness is partly because all of the risks related to Universal Credit have not been mitigated. We will report more on this in the next few days.

Meanwhile to try and answer the question in our headline: who’ll be responsible if Universal Credit goes wrong? The answer is: the private sector probably. Or rather nobody in the public sector.

Can hundreds of millions be spent on Universal Credit in an agile way?

Universal Credit suppliers Accenture and IBM look to India for skills.

Is Universal Credit a brilliant idea that’s bound to fail?

Universal Credit latest

Universal Credit and the banks.

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, capacity building, change, change management, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, India, IT projects, local government, managing change, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, outsourcing, oversight, Politics, procurement, project management, public sector, Real-Time Information, reducing cost strategically, risk, Universal Credit

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Department of Energy & Climate Change announces new consultation on CRC

Posted on 27/03/2012 | Leave a comment

By David Bicknell

In a press release today, the Department of Energy & Climate Change has announced a consultation on simplifying the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency scheme.

DECC says that participants will see their administrative costs cut by almost two-thirds, equating to around £330 million of savings up to 2030.

CRC is a mandatory UK-wide trading  scheme covering large business and public sector organisation, who produce 12% of UK carbon emissions. It requires businesses to report on and pay a tax on energy used, and ranks businesses in a performance league table which provides a further reputational incentive to improve their energy efficiency.

Following Chancellor George Osborne’s criticism of the scheme’s complexity in last week’s Budget, DECC now says businesses will now have the opportunity to comment on Government’s proposals. 

The simplified package proposed is aimed at retaining the energy-saving and reputational benefits of the CRC, whilst reducing the bureaucracy of taking part.

Secretary of State Ed Davey said:

“We have listened to businesses’ concerns about the CRC and have set out proposals to radically cut down on ‘red tape’ to save businesses money. The benefits of the scheme are clear though. It will deliver substantial carbon savings helping us to meet carbon budgets, and it encourages businesses to take action to improve their energy efficiency”.

DECC says the simplified package will include:

  • A shortening of the CRC qualification process.
  • Reducing the number of fuels covered by CRC from 29 to 4.
  • Reducing the amount of reporting required by businesses.
  • Reducing the length of time participants will have to keep records.
  • Removing the requirement on facilities covered by Climate Change Agreement or EU Emissions Trading System installations to purchase CRC allowances. 
  • Adopting new emissions factors for the CRC which will align it with Greenhouse Gas reporting processes.
  • Removing the detailed metrics of the Performance League Table from legislation and placing them in government guidance.

The formal consultation will run for twelve weeks, with the Government planning to amend the legislation for CRC by April 2013.

Consultation on a simplified CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Climate Change, CRC, Green IT

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