Category Archives: IT projects

Has 2 decades of outsourcing cut costs at HMRC?

Posted on 12/08/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

If HMRC’s experience is anything to go by, outsourcing can, in the long-term, at least triple an organisation’s IT costs.

When Inland Revenue contracted out its 2,000-strong IT department to EDS, now HP, in 1994 it was the first major outsourcing deal in central government.

Costing a projected £1.03bn over 10 years the outsourcing was a success, according to the National Audit Office in a report in March 2000. The deal  enabled Inland Revenue to bring about changes in tax policy to a tight timetable, said the NAO’s Inland Revenue/EDS Strategic Partnership – Award of New Work.

But costs soared for vague reasons. Something called “post-contract verification” added £203m to the £1.03bn projected cost over 10 years. A further increase of £533m was because of “workload increases including new work”. Another increase of £248m was put down to inflation.

By now the deal with HP had risen from £1.03bn to about £2bn.

When the contract expired in 2004, HM Revenue and Customs and HP successfully transferred the IT staff to Capgemini. The new 10-year contract from 2004 to 2014 (which was later extended 2017) had a winning bid price of £2.83bn over 10 years.

So by 2004 the costs of outsourcing had risen from £1.03bn to £2.83bn.

The new contract in 2004 was called ASPIRE – Acquiring Strategic Partners for Inland Revenue. HMRC then added £900m to the ASPIRE contract for Fujitsu’s running of Customs & Excise systems. By now there were about 3,800 staff working on the contract.

The NAO said in its report in July 2006  – ASPIRE, the re-competition of outsourced IT services – that Gateway reviews had identified the need for a range of improvements in the management of the contract and projects.

Now costing £7.7bn over 10 years

The latest outsourcing costs have been obtained by Computing. It found that annual fees paid to Capgemini under ASPIRE were:

  • 2008/09:  £777.1m
  • 2009/10:  £728.9m
  • 2010/11:  £757.8m
  • 2011/12:  £735.5m
  • 2012/13:  £773.5m

So IT outsourcing costs have soared again. The original 10-year costs of outsourcing in 1994 were put at £1.03bn. Then the figure became about £2bn, then £2.83bn, then £3.7bn when Fujitsu’s contract was added to ASPIRE. Now annual IT outsourcing costs are running at about £770m a year – £7.7bn over 10 years.

So the original IT running costs of Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise have, under outsourcing contracts, more than tripled in about two decades.

Comment:

What happened to the prevailing notion that IT costs fall over the long-term, and that outsourcing brings down costs even further?

Shouldn’t HMRC’s IT costs be falling anyway because of reduced reliance on costly Fujitsu VME mainframes, reductions in data centres, modernisation of PAYE, and the clearance of time-consuming unreconciled items on more than 10 million tax files?

HMRC knows how much profit Capgemini makes under “open book” accounting. It’s a margin of about 10-15% says the NAO. Lower margins are for value-added service lines and higher margins for riskier projects. If the overall target profit margin of 12.3% is exceeded, HMRC can obtain an equal share of the extra profits.

There were 10 failures costing £3.25m in the first 15 months. Capgemini refunded £2.67m in service credits in the first year of the contract.

It’s also worth mentioning that Capgemini doesn’t get all the ASPIRE fees. It is the lead supplier in which there are around 300 subcontractors – including Fujitsu and BT.  Capgemini pays 65% of its fees to its subcontractors.

The outsourcing has helped to enable HMRC to bring in self-assessment online and other changes in tax policy. But HMRC’s quality of service generally (and not exclusively IT) is mixed, to put it politely.

The adjudicator for HMRC who intervenes in particularly difficult complaints identifies as particular problems the giving out of inaccurate information and recording information incorrectly.

She says in her 2013 annual report:

“I am disappointed at the number of complaints HMRC customers feel they need to refer to me in order to get resolution. My role should be to consider the difficult exceptions, not handle routine matters that are well within the capability of departmental staff to resolve successfully. At a time of austerity it is also important to note that the cost of dealing with customer dissatisfaction increases exponentially with every additional level of handling.”

RTI

There are complaints among payroll companies and specialists that real-time information  is not working as well as HMRC has claimed. There seems to be growing irritation with, for example, HMRC’s saying that companies owe much more than they do actually owe. And HMRC has been sending out thousands of tax codes that are wrong or change frequently – or both.

HMRC says it has made improvements but the helpline is appalling. It’s not unusual for callers to wait 30 minutes or more for an answer – or to hang on through multifarious automated messages only to be cut off.

That said there are signs HMRC is, in general, improving slowly. Chief executive of HMRC since 2012 Lin Homer is more down-to-earth and slightly more willing to own up to HMRC’s mistakes than her predecessors, and the fact that RTI and the modernisation of PAYE has got as far as it has is creditable.

But is HMRC a shining example of outsourcing at its best, of outsourcing that cuts costs in the long term? No. A decade of HP and a decade of Capgemini has shown that with outsourcing HMRC can cope, just about, with major changes in tax policy to demanding timetables. But the costs of the outsourcing contracts in the two decades since 1994 have more than tripled.

What about G-Cloud? We look forward to a change in direction from the incoming head of IT Mark Dearnley (if he has much say).

**

A Deloitte survey “The trend of bringing IT back in-house” dated February 2013, said that 48% of respondents in its Global Outsourcing and Insourcing survey 2012 reported that they had terminated an outsourcing agreement early, or for cause, or convenience. Those that took IT services back in-house mentioned cost reduction as a factor. Deloitte said factors included:

– the need for additional internal quality control due to poor quality from the outsourcer

– an increase in the price of service delivery through scope creep and excessive change orders.

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Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, CIO, Fujitsu, G-Cloud, Gateway reviews, Government IT, HMRC, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing outsourced services, operational issues, outsourcing, oversight, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, supplier relationships

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BT gets termination notice on £300m outsourcing contract

Posted on 22/07/2013 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

Sandwell Council has issued BT with a 30-day termination notice on a 15-year £300m outsourcing contract that has yet to reach its half-way point.

The metropolitan borough council says there are various defaults BT needs to resolve. Based at Oldbury, West Midlands, about five miles from Birmingham, Sandwell has been an outsourcing reference site for BT.

The company quoted Sandwell Council in its presentations that formed part of the bidding for Cornwall Council’s planned outsourcing work.

The “guaranteed” savings in Sandwell’s contract with BT appear to be based on a level of spending the council is not maintaining. One point of contention appears to be the council’s wish for BT to reduce its charges to the council in line with the authority’s lower levels of activity.

In June 2012 Sandwell submitted a change request that asked BT to recalculate the annual service charge because the service volumes delivered through the contract had reduced significantly.

The council wanted the recalculation to be based on a reduction in the workforce from around 7,400 in 2007 when the contract with BT was signed to 4,688 in mid 2012.

Government Computing quotes a council document on the dispute as saying

“A reduction in the workforce should have a corresponding reduction in volumes such as the size of the ICT estate, the payroll, HR support and budget holders. There have been volume reductions in invoices, the number of contracts administered and calls to the contact centre for some services.”

Sandwell’s 30-day termination notice to BT was issued on 16 July so it will expire around that time next month. The council says it is prepared to take back staff.

Sandwell council leader, Councillor Darren Cooper, told Government Computing: “Cabinet has approved a recommendation to start the process of ending our contract with BT. That termination will take effect in 30 days’ time unless BT puts right various defaults we have asked them to resolve.

“If we have to, I am confident we will be able to bring the services BT currently supplies to us back to the council and run them in the most effective way in future.”

Guaranteed

In 2007 BT and its joint bidder, outsourcing provider Liberata, had set out to run the council’s back-office functions at what was announced as a “guaranteed” reduced cost over the lifetime of the contract.

The deal was aimed at cutting costs and improving Sandwell’s IT infrastructure, HR, finance, payroll and customer services functions.

There was some success. The BT-led ‘Transform Sandwell’ team won the UK’s Best Customer Services Management Team at the National Customer Services Awards in December 2010.

BT built a 75,000 square foot office block for Transform Sandwell. It accommodated 400 employees of Transform Sandwell and a 300-strong customer service team working for BT.

Massive mistake?

Independent socialist councillor Mick Davies said “Someone somewhere has obviously made a massive mistake and the taxpayers of Sandwell will have to foot the bill… The writing seemed to be on the wall when BT’s partner in the project, Liberata, was dumped unceremoniously a couple of years ago.”

Sandwell Council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for strategic resources Councillor Steve Eling said: “In view of the current climate and public expenditure reductions, the council is engaging with its partner to determine services that are needed over the medium term and to reduce the overall costs in light of public spending reductions.”

Technologies used in the Transform Sandwell contact centre have included Verint Impact 360, Siebel CRM and Nortel Contact Centre 6.0.

A BT spokesman told the Halesowen News

“BT continually looks at ways to improve the service it provides to its customers. The original contract was signed in 2007 and as is normal with long-term partnerships BT constantly looks at ways to service the changing needs of both the council and citizens of Sandwell.”

BT told Government Computing it “has throughout – and remains – fully committed to delivering the commitments it made through the Transform Sandwell Partnership.”

The European Services Strategy Unit which has carried out detailed research on outsourcing contracts lists some of the terminated and reduced local authority strategic partnership contracts.

Sandwell has 72 councillors, 67 of which represent Labour.

Comment

At some point in a 10 or 15-year outsourcing contract a major dispute seems almost inevitable because a supplier’s business objectives will rarely change when the council’s priorities change.

BT’s deal with Sandwell was signed in 2007 – as was Southwest One’s deal with IBM – at a pre-austerity period.

Now that councils have been making, and continue to make, radical savings, they want the flexibility to cut their outsourcing costs too. But it may not be in the supplier’s interests to take profits that are much lower than expected.

No such thing as a free lunch

How can the business interests of outsourcing providers and their council clients ever completely align and move in time like synchronised swimmers?

The growing number of disputes in local authority outsourcing deals suggests that councils are not properly weighing up the risks when they sign deals.

Perhaps small groups of ruling councillors – such as those at Barnet – are too easily persuaded by the “guaranteed” savings on offer at the start of a contract.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. But try telling that to council Cabinet councillors who have cartoon-character pound signs in their eyes in the Disney period before a big outsourcing contract is well underway.

Let’s hope BT and Sandwell kiss and make up. It looks like the lawyers are already in the middle of them, though; and at whose expense?

Sandwell and BT consider end of strategic partnership – Government Computing

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Posted in BT, change management, efficiency savings, ERP, IT projects, IT-related failures, law, legal disputes, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, private sector lessons for the public sector, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, risk, shared services, supplier relationships

Hospitals accuse Capita of failings

Posted on 12/07/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

A nine-page letter written on behalf of eight health trusts is said to criticise Capita for “persistent minor failings” in managing payroll and other work formerly carried out by their human resources departments, says the Liverpool Post which has a copy of the letter.

The failings listed in the letter are said to include:

– overpaying staff, with trusts having problems recovering the monies paid out;

– breaching data protection by sending staff personal details to other employees;

– paying someone due to start work two months’ salary, despite their dropping out of the recruitment process;

 – delays in pre- employment checks, leading to highly valuable candidates withdrawing their application for a job;

– losing sensitive and confidential information

The Post says the letter threatens terminating the contract. “Health trusts stressed, unless they sort the problems out, they will not only deduct the cost incurred to them out of Capita’s payment but continued failure will result in them terminating its contract,” said the paper.

The letter was said to have been written by Debbie Fryer, director of human resources at Aintree UniversityHospitals, Fazakerley, on behalf of several trusts within the North Mersey Framework that have contracted out their payroll and human resources work to Capita.

It represents Fazakerley Hospital, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, the mental health trust Mersey Care NHS Trust, Liverpool Community Health NHS Trust, Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen hospitals, Wirral’s specialist Clatterbridge Cancer Centre and the specialist brain hospital The Walton Centre.

In 2011 the Capita Group announced  that it had been appointed as preferred supplier by a NHS North Mersey collaboration to deliver HR, payroll and recruitment services for up to 12 NHS trusts in Mersey.

The seven-year contract was worth up to £27m, with an option to extend for a further three years.  The contract was  expected to involve the TUPE transfer of up to 150 employees to Capita and the set up of new shared service centre based in Liverpool.

Capita said at the time it was first time NHS trusts had come together in the way they did to collectively outsource their HR, payroll and recruitment functions. 

The Liverpool Post says the letter expresses concern that Capita displayed a “laissez faire” attitude to personal data which had the potential to be “extremely damaging” to the trusts’ reputations and employee morale.

Trusts were said to have had difficulties recovering sums overpaid to employees, particularly former employees. Examples of lost documentation were said to be “almost too numerous to mention”, with documents seemingly disappearing into a “black hole”.

Ms Fryer is said to have been alarmed at some of the content of a report on Capita by auditors Grant Thornton in May. The letter sought concrete proposals on how Capita was going to resolve the situation.

A spokesman for Capita told the Post: “Capita is under contract with 10 trusts in the north west of England as a part of a framework agreement to deliver transactional HR services, including payroll and recruitment.

“As a part of this contract, Capita has been consolidating each trust’s individual HR and recruitment processes moving these to one common process applicable to all trusts under the framework.

“The simpler, improved process will make HR services easier and quicker for staff to use, lightening the administrative burden so trusts can focus on patient care.

“In order to implement these valuable changes, Capita and the trusts are currently undergoing a period of transformation as individual, often paper-based, services move to this common process.

“During this period, some challenges have arisen for both the trusts and Capita. However, Capita is working closely with the trusts involved to overcome those issues identified in order to deliver an enhanced service for trusts and their staff.”

Liverpool Post article

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, IT projects, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, operational issues, outsourcing, public sector, shared services, supplier relationships

Defra’s agile plan with multiple suppliers risky says NAO

Posted on 11/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The National Audit Office says in a report published today that Defra’s agile plan which involves outsourcing to multiple IT suppliers has “significant” risks.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs plans to implement a single integrated £80m Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system built on agile methodologies.

Defra has been working with the Government Digital Service (GDS) to plan an agile implementation and learn from the lessons of the past, the department’s chief operating officer Ian Trenholm told Computer Weekly in January 2013.

Today’s NAO report on Defra’s 2012/13 accounts says that the department is planning the procurement, development and implementation of new systems in line with changes to the way the common agricultural policy operates.

“Development and implementation of these [new systems] will present a number of challenges, including the requirement that data cleansing is completed on time, in order to ensure that accurate and complete data is transferred to the new systems,” says the NAO.

It adds that the IT element of the change programme “will be delivered through an agile approach which involves outsourcing to multiple IT providers”. The NAO says that Defra has recognised a number of significant risks relating to the Programme. “It will need a strong relationship between the Programme team and other important stakeholders, and appropriate governance arrangements, to ensure that these risks are adequately managed and that the Department learns the lessons from the implementation of CAP 2005.”

NAO report on Defra’s 2012/13 accounts.

Comment

Defra and its Rural Payments Agency had a disaster with the Single Payment Scheme which was built on conventional lines through one main supplier. If there are risks with the new agile approach involving multiple suppliers they cannot be as great as spending hundreds of millions of pounds with one company; and working through those new agile-related risks may help other departments find a different and much cheaper way of buying IT, and implementing important policy-related business change.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, DEFRA, EU procurement, GDS, Government IT, IT projects, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships

Is HMRC’s RTI project really a success?

Posted on 10/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

On  Eddie Mair’s “PM” programme on R4, I suggested that HMRC’s real-time information project was not the failure many had expected it to be.

“Even some hawk-eyed critics of government IT projects like journalist Tony Collins think that HMRC may have something of a success on its hands,” said BBC reporter Chris Vallance who produced the RTI item.

I was quoted as saying that many had expected RTI to become another government IT disaster. “But given that there are millions of PAYE employees who are on the system at the moment, if there were any major difficulties we’d expect to have seen them by now.”

Now an HMRC expert has questioned whether my comments were justified. He says parts of RTI are in chaos. He doesn’t want to be named. He writes:

“The RTI system was intended to report on a weekly or monthly basis the same information as had previously been reported by employers on an annual basis. Although details of pay and tax would be forwarded to HMRC far more frequently the same core logic applied. Details of the statutory deductions by the employer would have to be reconciled with payments made, and details of the income and tax paid recorded against the employee’s PAYE record.

“What appears to have happened is that HMRC has designed a system that takes details of employees’ earned or pension income, and statutory PAYE deductions, and then makes various illogical assumptions.

“For instance it would appear that where an employee receives no earnings in a particular pay period, the RTI system assumes that no information is “transmitted” for this employee, indicating that the employee has “left the employment”.

“Similarly where an employer undertakes a re-order of the pay identities (codes on the payroll system called Works Numbers that identify employees), the fact that payroll information is transmitted to HMRC with a Works Number different to that used previously triggers an assumption that the employee has two employments, with the same employer.

“This has the consequence of allowing the NPS (New PAYE Computer System – costing in excess of £400 million) to assume that the employee’s estimated income for the tax year has doubled. The NPS then looks to see if the employee has any part-time or other employment, and in many cases it changes the PAYE code number of these part-time employments from Basic Rate, which deducts tax at 20%, to Code D0, which deducts tax at 40%. All because of an incorrect and invalid assumption.

“Similarly, this failure to understand how PAYE and payroll interact has lead to the situation where an employee who leaves an employment that has attracted a PAYE coding deduction for Car Benefit in Kind and starts another Employment, has the PAYE Coding Deduction removed. The fact that the new employment may well involve a company car is completely ignored, with the result that the employee is more than likely to have a large underpayment of income tax at the year end, despite being on PAYE.

“This failure to understand the basic operation and logic of PAYE would appear to be due to that fact that HMRC has been influenced by those who have an understanding of data flows and cash transfers. The rush to modernise PAYE and move away from “a 1940’s system” has completely omitted the fact that basic operations for employments, tax and NI deductions and the accountability of these remains exactly the same, even if the calculations are undertaken electronically rather than with a quill pen and large ledger book.

“The old PAYE system had as part of its reporting system two components: the forms P14 detailing each individual’s pay, tax etc. and a summary of all employees information, the form P35. The P14 passed information to the NPS system and the P35 information was passed to the accounts computer systems. This allowed HMRC to determine the income of the employee and calculate if sufficient income tax etc had been paid. It also allowed HMRC to match the figure of tax / NIC due and payable on the P35 with the amount actually received from the employer. RTI has failed to comply with this basic logic and chaos is ensuing, to the extent that the National Audit Office recently commented

 ‘The financial and accounting systems supporting RTI are not yet fully accredited. Financial accreditation is a formal requirement of HMRC’s Change Programme and provides assurance that any new systems are acceptable for accounting and financial control purposes. The RTI systems went live on the basis that action would be taken to resolve identified financial design issues by 31 October 2013.

‘These issues do not affect an employer’s ability to submit data to HMRC but do weaken HMRC’s ability to produce and report financial information on PAYE. HMRC is currently undertaking work to understand the impact of these issues and how best to address them.’

“Why the RTI system was not designed in the same logical manner is of great concern.

“The system failures that are occurring are not due to computer components or programs not being fit for purpose. Indeed the processing of the PAYE data streamed to HMRC as a result of the RTI system could reasonably be compared to any other large commercial organisation, albeit that the NAO has concerns over the fall-back planning HMRC has in place should there be any hardware failures and commented

‘The resilience needed to maintain the RTI service if there is a major technical failure is not in place. Online and time-sensitive system implementations are usually developed with formal technical resilience and disaster recovery capability.

‘HMRC chose not to pay for full resilience because of the cost implications and because PAYE could be operated in an emergency without RTI. However, although RTI has the potential to be used by other government departments, the lack of full resilience may inhibit its use in areas of activity where a temporary disruption to service cannot be tolerated.

‘Data submissions can be held temporarily in a queue but this would not provide continuity of service in the event of a catastrophic failure. The RTI service failing at a critical processing time could increase the volume of customer communications and lead to more effort for employers.’

“The RTI system is a very clear example of basic failures to properly prepare a Business Analysis Requirement for a system which in essence does no more that increase the number of times payroll information is passed to HMRC. Claims for the reinvention of PAYE for the 21st Century are as invalid as the claim that the ability to write has been done away with due to email and electronic communication. There has been a flawed reliance on the thoughts and views of those who have little or no experience in PAYE or payroll.”

On the PM programme, Ruth Owen, Director General of PersonalTax at HMRC, accepted that all was not perfect. She said

“We have had over 1.4 million PAYE schemes come into Real-Time Information [each PAYE scheme may have many employees on it] and that exceeds our expectations at this point in the year. But there’s still more to do. We have got to get everybody on and there are still people who need our help to get on.”

She added: “We have had a small number of difficult issues… We have had issues where people have got the wrong tax codes.”

Owen said the links between RTI and Universal Credit were “going well” but conceded that there have been only a tiny number of UC claimants so far.

“We have had around 100 claimants who we have helped DWP identify income stream data for. So it’s going to plan at the moment.”

Chris Vallance concluded the item by saying that some of the largest employers have yet to be added to RTI. “It’s only when it works at scale that we will really know how good real-time information really is,” he said.

Update: Chartered accountant Baker Tilly says on its website  that thousands of people have been issued wrong tax codes as a result of RTI-related problems. 

Audio of PM programme item on RTI – 4 July 2013 (approx 5 mins)

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Posted in change management, Disaster recovery, Government IT, HMRC, IT projects, procurement, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

Whitehall to lose its best troubleshooter

Posted on 05/07/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

David Pitchford, who is arguably the civil service’s most able troubleshooter, is to quit the civil service in September and return to his native Australia for undisclosed family reasons. The FT broke the story yesterday.

Pitchford is Executive Director at the understaffed Major Projects Authority. It aims to work in partnership with permanent secretaries and senior civil servants to improve the success rate of major departmental IT and other large projects. 

In practice some senior civil servants in central departments resent the intrusion of the Cabinet Office. They do not like having to present their big schemes to the Major Projects Authority, particularly as it has David Cameron’s mandate to stop or re-scope failing projects.

Fighting intransigence? 

One unanswered question about Pitchford’s quitting is: has his morale been beaten down by departmental intransigence and even ill-will? Has the system defeated Pitchford and the taxpayer – the same system that confronted other Cabinet Office reformers John Suffolk, Chris Chant and Andy Tait?

It is possible that Pitchford feels his work is done now that the Major Projects Authority has finally, and after some departmental resistance, produced its first annual report.

The report’s key feature is its “traffic light” status on the projects it is keeping an eye on. In a foreword to the report, Pitchford wrote:

“April 2013 marks two years of the Major Projects Authority… For the first time, the country’s biggest and most high-risk projects are scrutinised so problems are exposed before they spiral out of control. Over two-thirds of major projects are predicted to deliver their promises on time and on budget, more than double the historic success rate. However, the MPA has studied carefully what goes on in every department, and we have uncovered some weaknesses which we are continuing to address.

“The MPA was established following a landmark report by the National Audit Office in 2010, which recommended a wholesale shift in the administration of major projects. It works closely with individual departments’ project teams and Permanent Secretaries to monitor and improve the management of major projects…the MPA’s Government Major Projects Portfolio has improved the rate of successful project delivery from under 30% to over 70%.

“Our success has been achieved by focusing intensively on the three core elements of successful project management: improving leadership; improving the operating environment; and looking closely at the past lessons.”

Pitchford is a much-valued executive in part because he can see why projects are failing and is straight-talking. He joined the Cabinet Office in November 2009 and in 2010 told a conference what he had discovered so far about the reasons for the failure of UK government projects:

– Political pressure

– No business case

– No agreed budget

– 80% of projects launched before 1,2 & 3 have been resolved

– Sole solution approach (options not considered)

– Lack of Commercial capability – (contract / administration)

– No plan

– No timescale

– No defined benefits

Since then Pitchford has been a little more guarded now about what he says in public. Campaign4Change said in February 2013 that the longer he stays in the innately secretive civil service the more guarded he seems to become but he is still one the best assets the Cabinet Office has. His main advantage is his independence from government departments.

Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, said he would “much miss David’s sharp wit and impressive leadership”.

Is Pitchford’s departure a sign that the non-reformers in Whitehall departments are winning the battle against major change?

 

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change management, cost reduction, G-Cloud, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector

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How to cost-justify the NPfIT disaster – forecast benefits a decade away

Posted on 07/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

To Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, the NPfIT was a failure. In an interview with the FT, reported on 2 June 2013, Hunt said of the NPfIT

“It was a huge disaster . . . It was a project that was so huge in its conception but it got more and more specified and over-specified and in the end became impossible to deliver … But we musn’t let that blind us to the opportunities of technology and I think one of my jobs as health secretary is to say, look, we must learn from that and move on but we must not be scared of technology as a result.”

Now Hunt has a different approach.  “I’m not signing any big contracts from behind [my] desk; I am encouraging hospitals and clinical commissioning groups and GP practices to make their own investments in technology at the grassroots level.”

Hunt’s indictment of the NPfIT has never been accepted by some senior officials at the DH, particularly the outgoing chief executive of the NHS Sir David Nicholson. Indeed the DH is now making strenuous attempts to cost justify the NPfIT, in part by forecasting benefits for aspects of the programme to 2024.

The DH has not published its statement which attempts to cost justify the NPfIT. But the National Audit Office yesterday published its analysis of the unpublished DH statement. The NAO’s analysis “Review of the final benefits statement for programmes previously managed under the National Programme for IT in the NHS” is written for the Public Accounts Committee which meets next week to question officials on the NPfIT. 

A 22 year programme?

When Tony Blair gave the NPfIT a provisional go-ahead at a meeting in Downing Street in 2002, the programme was due to last less than three years. It was due to finish by the time of the general election of 2005. Now the NPfIT  turns out to be a programme lasting up to 22 years.

Yesterday’s NAO report says the end-of-life of the North, Midlands and East of England part of the NPfIT is 2024. Says the NAO

“There is, however, very considerable uncertainty around whether the forecast benefits will be realised, not least because the end-of-life dates for the various systems extend many years into the future, to 2024 in the case of the North, Midlands and East Programme for IT.”

The DH puts the benefits of the NPfIT at £3.7bn to March 2012 – against costs of £7.3bn to March 2012.

Never mind: the DH has estimated the forecast benefits to the end-of-life of the systems at £10.7bn. This is against forecast costs of £9.8bn to the end-of-life of the systems.

The forecast end-of-life dates are between 2016 and 2024. The estimated costs of the NPfIT do not include any settlement with Fujitsu over its £700m claim against NHS Connecting for Health. The forecast costs (and potential benefits) also exclude the patient administration system Lorenzo because of uncertainties over the CSC contract.

The NAO’s auditors raise their eyebrows at forecasting of benefits so far into the future. Says the NAO report

“It is clear there is very considerable uncertainty around the benefits figures reported in the benefits statement. This arises largely because most of the benefits relate to future periods and have not yet been realised. Overall £7bn (65 per cent) of the total estimated benefits are forecast to arise after March 2012, and the proportion varies considerably across the individual programmes depending on their maturity.

“For three programmes, nearly all (98 per cent) of the total estimated benefits were still to be realised at March 2012, and for a fourth programme 86 per cent of benefits remained to be realised.

There are considerable potential risks to the realisation of future benefits, for example systems may not be deployed as planned, meaning that benefits may be realised later than expected or may not be realised at all…”

NPfIT is not dead

The report also reveals that the DH considers the NPfIT to be far from dead. Says the NAO

“From April 2013, the Department [of Health] appointed a full-time senior responsible owner accountable for the delivery of the [the NPfIT] local service provider contracts for care records systems in London, the South and the North, Midlands and East, and for planning and managing the major change programme that will result from these contracts ending.

“The senior responsible owner is supported by a local service provider programme director in the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

“In addition, from April 2013, chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts became responsible for the realisation and reporting of benefits on the ground. They will also be responsible for developing local business cases for the procurement of replacement systems ready for when the local service provider contracts end.”

The NAO has allowed the DH to include as a benefit of the NPfIT parts of the programme that were not included in the original programme such as PACS x-ray systems.

Officials have also assumed as a benefit quicker diagnosis from the Summary Care Record and text reminders using NHSmail which the DH says reduces the number of people who did not attend their appointment by between 30 and 50 per cent.

Comment

One of the most remarkable things about the NPfIT is the way benefits have always been – and still are – referred to in the future tense. Since the NPfIT was announced in 2002, numerous ministerial statements, DH press releases and conference announcements have all referred to what will happen with the NPfIT.

Back in June 2002, the document that launched the NPfIT, Delivering 21st Century IT for the NHS, said:

“We will quickly develop the infrastructure …”

“In 2002/03 we will seek to accelerate the pace of development …

“Phase 1 – April 2003 to December 2005 …Full National Health Record Service implemented, and accessible nationally for out of hours reference.”

In terms of the language used little has changed. Yesterday’s NAO report is evidence that the DH is still saying that the bulk of the benefits will come in future.

Next week (12 June) NHS chief Sir David Nicholson is due to appear before the Public Accounts Committee to answer questions on the NPfIT. One thing is not in doubt: he will not concede that the programme has been a failure.

Neither will he concede that a fraction of the £7.3bn spent on the programme up to March 2012 would have been needed to join up existing health records for the untold benefit of patients, especially those with complex and long-term conditions.

Isn’t it time MPs called the DH to account for living in cloud cuckoo land? Perhaps those at the DH who are still predicting the benefits of the NPfIT into the distant future should be named.

They might just as well have predicted, with no less credibility, that in 2022 the bulk of the NPfIT’s benefits would be delivered by the Flower Fairies.

It is a nonsense that the DH is permitted to waste time on this latest cost justification of the NPfIT. Indeed it is a continued waste of money for chief executives of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts to have been made responsible, as of April 2013, for reporting the benefits of the NPfIT.

Jeremy Hunt sums up the NPfIT when he says it has been a huge disaster. It is the UK’s biggest-ever IT disaster. Why does officialdom not accept this?

Instead of wasting more money on delving into the haystack for benefits of the NPfIT, it would be more sensible to allocate money and people to spreading the word within Whitehall and to the wider public sector on the losses of the NPfIT and the lessons that must be learnt to discourage any future administrations from embarking on a multi-billion pound folly.

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Posted in Atos, BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, change, change management, CSC, e-health, excessive secrecy, Fujitsu, health records, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services, Summary Care Record

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Francis Maude boasts of £10bn savings but …

Posted on 03/06/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins 

This morning Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude held a press conference with his senior officials to announce that civil servants have radically changed the way they work to save £10bn in 2012/13.

The savings are nearly £2bn higher than originally planned and, according to the Cabinet Office, have been “reviewed and verified” by independent auditors.

With a little journalistic licence Maude says: “…we are on the way to managing our finances like the best-run FTSE100 businesses.”

The breakdown of the £10bn savings:

Procurement   £3.8bn
Centralisation of procurement for common goods and services  £1.0bn
Centrally renegotiating large government contracts  £0.8bn
Limiting expenditure on marketing and advertising, consultants and temporary agency staff   £1.9bn
Transformation savings   £1.1bn
IT spend controls and moving government services and transactions onto digital platforms  £0.5bn
Optimising the government’s property portfolio  £0.6bn
Project savings   £1.7bn
Reviewing performance of major government projects  £1.2bn
Taking waste out of the construction process  £0.4bn
Workforce savings   £3.4bn
Reducing the size of the Civil Service   £2.2bn
Increasing contributions to public sector pensions   £1.1bn

Comment

It’s good news and the figures don’t seem plucked out of thin air which sometimes happens when central government announces savings.

The big question is whether the savings are sustainable. Maude has inspired the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group to be motivated and hard-working. But bringing about long-term change in Whitehall – as opposed to restricting consultancy contracts and cutting annual costs of supplier contracts by reducing what’s delivered – is like peddling uphill. How long can you do it without losing motivation and energy? It’s not just parts of the civil service that are resistant to the savings agenda – it is also some IT suppliers, according to Government Computing.

It’s likely that only profound changes in central government operations and working practices will outlast the next general election. At the moment the civil service is like a rubber band that has been stretched a little. It wants to return to its standard shape, which the next government may allow it to do.

The National Audit Office said in its report in April 2012 on the Efficiency and Reform Group in 2011/12:

“Savings to date have differing degrees of sustainability.”

The NAO also said this:

“It is not fully clear how ERG intends to make the reforms necessary to secure enough savings over the rest of the spending review. ERG has yet to translate its ambition for saving £20 billion by 2014-15 into more detailed plans.

“ERG has made progress in developing strategies across its wide range of responsibilities, and is focusing on core activities likely to produce savings. However, until recently ERG’s focus has mainly been on the savings themselves, with less emphasis on delivery of the longer-term changes and improvement in efficiency necessary to make them sustainable.”

And this:

“Departments have still tended to lack a clear strategic vision of what they are to do, what they are not, and the most cost-effective way of delivering it. Much of departments’ 2014-15 savings are likely to come from further reductions in staff. Sustainability of these savings will depend on developing skills and working in new ways while maintaining staff motivation and engagement.”

But the NAO was generally positive about the ERG’s contribution to savings.

“ERG’s actions to date, particularly its spending controls, have helped departments deliver substantial spending reductions.”

We hope the Cabinet Office’s diligent efforts continue  – sustainably.

Efficiency and Reform 2012/13 savings. Summary report.

Some suppliers still resistant to change? – Government Computing.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, capacity building, change, change management, Cloud, Cloud Computing, consultants, cost reduction, culture, G-Cloud, Government IT, Green IT, IT projects, Major Projects Authority, managing change, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically

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Report on status of big Gov’t projects to be published at last

Posted on 09/05/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Telegraph reports that the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority is about to publish its first annual report – and it will reveal the status of schemes that include Universal Credit, says the article.

The Cabinet Office said in 2011 that the MPA’s annual report would be published by the end of December that year. In 2012 Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the civil service, told the Public Accounts Committee’s Conservative MP Richard Bacon that the MPA’s annual report would be published in June 2012.

But senior departmental  civil servants have objected repeatedly to the red-amber-green “traffic light” status of projects being published, which contradicts the wishes of Kerslake and Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister.

One reason for the delay in publishing the MPA annual report is that Maude and Kerslake have been weighing objections to the reporting of the red-amber-green status against the need for departmental cooperation to implement civil service reforms.

From the Telegraph article it appears that Maude has persuaded (or forced) departmental heads to accept the publication of the traffic light status on big and risky projects. The Major Projects Authority reviews IT and other projects costing more than £50m.

The Telegraph says the MPA annual report will reveal Government troubleshooters’ concerns about multi-billion pound projects like the Universal Credit.

The article says the MPA annual report will show that about a third of projects it has reviewed are late or over budget. Says the Telegraph: “Government sources said that the MPA will show that management of big projects has improved significantly since 2010, when two-thirds of programmes were in trouble.

“But the report, expected later this month, will confirm that Whitehall ‘still has a long way to go’ to improve its handling of major projects, a source said.”

The article adds that publication of the annual report “follows a lengthy internal struggle between ministers and civil servants about the disclosure of problems with big Government schemes”.

Some ministers, says the article, are privately concerned that civil servants are bad at managing big, expensive projects but repeatedly cover up their failings and refuse to tell ministers about problems.  Disclosing “candid” assessments about big projects will improve management, ministers believe.

The Telegraph says that a “new publication scheme that will start later this month” will publicly rate each project at red, amber, or green. 

Each central department will be told to publish details of its major projects every six months, including the red-amber-green ratings and the data behind them, says the article.

The Telegraph quotes as a coalition source as saying: “Releasing a candid report about Whitehall’s major projects is a big and brave step for Government…”

Management of big projects better but still generally poor? 

Lord Browne, a lead non-executive in the Cabinet Office and the man appointed to recruit business leaders to Whitehall departmental boards, has criticised the management of major projects as “worryingly poor”.

He said that insufficient attention was given to identifying risks in the planning stage, and that there had been a “consistent failure” to appoint leaders with the right skills and experience.

Browne said the creation of the Major Projects Authority (MPA) in the Cabinet Office in 2011 had improved their delivery, but “nobody ever intervenes in a poor project soon enough” and that warning signs were often ignored or under-reported.

He called for an “ongoing and rigorous review process with real teeth” which would monitor measures of progress and call “time out” on failing projects, allowing them either to be fixed or stopped.

Browne said the government could learn from the private sector, where projects are scrutinised to a “very high standard” before work begins. In line with this, he suggested that the MPA should have a strengthened “stage-gate approval process” to ensure that projects achieve objectives.

He said that projects should not be allowed to begin until a team with the right skills – including a leader who had previously delivered a large, complex project – had been identified.

He also suggested that the MPA nominate leaders and veto unsuitable candidates. He said that expensive projects should “never be seen as a personal development opportunity”.

He advocated using pay, benefits and bonuses to give team members incentives to work on the project “until appropriate milestones are reached”. This, Browne said, had been key to the success of major projects delivered by the private sector.

Departments still sceptical of Maude’s reforms?

Meanwhile the FT has reported that Maude’s attempts to inject commercial acumen into Whitehall by putting leading business figures on departmental boards is failing to live up to its billing, with some departments rarely consulting their external non-executive directors.

The FT says that the Treasury department’s supervisory board met only once in the year to April 2012, according to a report by Insight Public Affairs, a consultancy. The energy department’s board met twice, compared to 15 meetings in the transport department, reflecting the inconsistent involvement of non-executive directors.

John Lehal, managing director of Insight Public Affairs, said the ad hoc manner in which departments held board meetings reflected the need for greater accountability – as underlined by the Treasury’s failure to engage its non-executives.

Comment

At long last the Major Projects Authority, under the straight-talking Australian David  Pitchford, will publish its annual report; and it may contain more detail on major projects than has been published by any government.

As departments fear public embarrassment more than any other sanction, publication of the traffic light status of projects – with the underlying detail – should genuinely discourage the starting of ill-considered projects.

Although the MPA annual report is much delayed Maude has succeeded in getting agreement for it to be published. Provided it contains enough detail to allow the status of projects to be judged by armchair auditors, it should begin to make a real difference.

Telegraph article

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Posted in change management, Gateway reviews, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, openness and transparency, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Decline of the great British government IT scandal

Posted on 07/05/2013 | 5 comments

This is a guest post by SA Mathieson, writer of Card declined: how Britain said no to ID cards, three times over .

Whatever happened to the great British government IT scandal?

In the 2000s, such events kept many journalists gainfully employed. Careers were built around the likes of the NHS National Programme for IT and identity cards. But their numbers have fallen away – both the scandals and the journalists – as this government’s programme of austerity reaches even this area of spending.

In seriousness, despite the fact that there are fewer juicy stories, the apparent decline in the number of government IT scandals is clearly a good thing for Britain. But why has it come about; and is it real, or are there problems below the surface?

The Labour government of 1997 to 2010 had a weakness for big IT projects. Some of this stemmed from a creditable wish to modernise the state, but some came from a starry-eyed over-estimation of what IT could do. This may have been generational: its leaders, in particular Tony Blair, liked the sound of IT but had little experience of using it. Mr Blair’s former communications head Alastair Campbell tells a good anecdote about getting a first text message from his former boss after they had left power… sent a word at a time.

Asking too much of IT had serious implications: neither Mr Blair nor a stream of home secretaries ever addressed the serious concerns about the reliability of biometric technology, on which the national identity scheme was heavily dependent, with David Blunkett once telling the Today programme that the scheme would make “the theft of our identity and multiple identities impossible. Not nearly impossible, but impossible”.

Nor did they realise that IT is better at sharing information than securing it – until HM Revenue and Customs lost 25 million people’s personal data on unencrypted discs in the government’s internal mail service in 2007. This over-confidence in technology and security led to other ‘surveillance state’ projects, such as the ContactPoint database of all children and the e-Borders system to monitor all international journeys (the former abolished, the latter only partially implemented with a third of journeys still not covered). 

Mr Blair and his colleagues also ignored what any good technology leader will tell you: that a successful IT project is really about people, organisations and processes. The NHS National Programme for IT did not fail because of IT – parts of it worked fine, and replacement contracts for its N3 broadband network and NHSmail email service are currently being purchased.

The National Programme’s failure came in trying to push individual NHS trusts, which differ enormously, into installing homogenous patient record software.

Implementing such software is difficult enough in one trust – mainly because highly-skilled medical practitioners don’t take kindly to being told what to do, rather than because of insurmountable IT problems – but is still a better bet than trying to impose systems from above.

The present government has learnt that lesson, setting a timescale for electronic patient records’ introduction but leaving trusts to do the work. If some trusts fail to meet this, the result will be local IT scandals rather than a great British one. This is also the level of accident-prone attempts by local government and police forces to outsource IT, such as Somerset’s Southwest One entanglement with IBM.

By downsizing the surveillance state, such as ditching ID cards and stepping back from greatly increased internet monitoring, as well as introducing the likes of Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit in a sensibly incremental fashion,  this government has reduced the likelihood of UK-wide disasters. But while the great British IT scandal has declined, it is not dead. It is just more likely to take place at a local level, away from the national media and political spotlight.

SA Mathieson’s book, Card declined: how Britain said no to ID cards, three times over, reviews the attempts and failures of governments over the last three quarters of a century to introduce identity cards in Britain, focusing on the Identity Cards Act passed in 2006 and repealed in 2010, an issue he covered as a journalist from start to end. It is available as an e-book for £2.99 (PDF  or Kindle and in print for £4.99. 

This article also appears on SA Mathieson’s website.

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Posted in Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, Universal Credit

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