Category Archives: IT-related failures

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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Why isn’t Universal Credit IT a disaster yet?

Posted on 30/04/2013 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

voltaireVoltaire said those who walk well-trodden paths tend to throw stones at those who show a new road. 

Iain Duncan Smith has had nothing but criticism in the media for his extreme caution over the go-live yesterday of the innovative Universal Credit scheme. But he told Radio 4’s Today presenter Justin Webb he was learning from the NHS IT scheme and the implementation of tax credits.

[With the NPfIT the Department of Health threw caution to the wind and spent billions on IT work and contracts that were unnecessary. After working tax credits went live the Office of National Statistics estimated that, of the £13.5bn paid out in tax credits in 2004, £1.9bn was in overpayments; and IT-related problems led to delays in issuing payments, which caused hardship for those on low incomes.]

Iain_Duncan_Smith,_June_2007IDS said on R4 Today yesterday:

“What I have introduced here is a deliberate and slower process introduction because I learned from the chaos of tax credits where it collapsed and the chaos of the health department’s changes to their IT systems. I want to do this carefully to make sure we get it right.”

Justin Webb: But your critics say you are not testing the things that could go wrong – children and homeless people are not involved.  When are you going to involve them in a pilot?

IDS: They are all going to be involved as we roll out.

Webb: There will be a pilot that includes those more difficult groups?

IDS: These pilots are to test two things; first of all that the base process works and secondly that all the other issues …

Webb: No homeless people involved in that. The difficult people are not involved?

IDS: What we are doing is testing the basic process. As we roll out from October onwards we then complicate the process and we roll it out in such a way as we are able to bring those people in and ensure that we also test them as we are going through. It’s a perpetual process of rolling out and checking, rolling out and checking. That is the better way to do it. I have done this in the private sector and Lord Freud [work and pensions minister] did this in the banking sector. We have insisted on it because this is the right way to do it. Get it right. Not get it early.

Can IDS be too cautious?

Universal Credit is live on GOV.UK.  To claim it now you need to live in an OL6, OL7, M43 or SK16 postcode, have just become unemployed, fit for work, have no children, not be claiming disability benefits, not have any caring responsibilities, not be homeless or living in temporary accommodation, and have a valid bank account and national insurance number.

But still it’s a test of links between UC  and HMRC’s RTI systems. If the links are working properly the systems should verify that the new UC claimant has recently left PAYE employment. The pilot in Ashton is also a test of the UC payment system and whether the new scheme will encourage claimants to find a job and stay in work longer.

On Sunday, on BBC Radio 5’s Double Take, I praised the Department of Work and Pensions for an ultra-cautious approach in going live with UC.

But IT consultant Brian Wernham, author of Agile Project Management for Government, pointed out to BBC’s World This Weekend that thousands of people will need to claim UC every day from the official start of the scheme in October 2013 to the end of 2017 if the DWP is to complete its UC roll-out within the coalition’s promised schedule.

Yet the limited pilot in Ashton has restricted claimants to about 300 a month. At this rate the roll-out to more than eight million claimants will not be anywhere near complete by the end of 2017.

Comment

The Financial Times quotes Iain Duncan Smith as saying that one million claimants would be receiving universal credit by the end of April 2014.

This is now unlikely if not impossible. Even in October when the UC roll-out begins nationally, it will start with simple cases. By April 2014 it is hard to see that there will be 100,000 people claiming UC, let alone one million. Indeed the most complex cases may be handled outside of the main UC system, possibly manually or on a spreadsheet.

Why should the coalition care if the 2017 deadline is not met? A general election on 7 May 2015 means that UC will become the responsibility of a new government. IDS is then unlikely to be the DWP’s secretary of state. He could argue at that time that he should not be held responsible for any delays in the roll-out. Indeed the Tories could be out of government by then.

So what the coalition says now about UC’s future means little or nothing.

That said, the coalition seems to be learning lessons from past IT-related failures. It deserves praise for its extreme caution over the introduction of UC.

It is not doing everything right: the DWP is refusing to publish any of its expensive consultancy reports on the progress of the UC IT systems. Partly that is because of DWP culture and because shadow ministers are waiting to jump on any putative weakness in the UC scheme. Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said on yesterday’s Today programme that universal credit was “a fine idea that builds on Labour’s tax credits revolution”.

liam byrneHe added: “The truth is the scheme is late, over budget, the IT system appears to be falling apart and even DWP [Department of Work and Pensions] ministers admit they haven’t got a clue what is going on.”

But when Byrne was in government he was an unswerving advocate of the disastrous NPfIT. So can his criticism of the UC project be trusted now?

Despite a generally negative media there are no signs yet that UC is a disaster in the making.  Indeed RTI is working so far, which was the biggest single risk.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is said to remain concerned that UC could prove an electoral disaster, and his concern is good for the UC IT project. It means the coalition will continue to roll out UC with extreme caution.

Such a play-it-safe approach might never have occurred before on a major government IT project. So does it matter that UC  takes years to roll out?

Perhaps the roll-out may continue well beyond 2017 but it’s better to complete a simplification of the benefits system over an extended time than pay claimants the wrong amounts or leave the vulnerable without payment altogether.  

Teething troubles on day one of Universal Credit scheme – Guardian

Could HMRC have a major success on its hands? – RTIis working

The vultures circle over Universal Credit IT.

DWP hides the facts on UC IT progress.

Are civil servants misleading IDS over Universal Credit IT progress?

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Posted in Agile, change management, DWP, Government IT, HMRC, innovation, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, Universal Credit

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Somerset County Council settles IBM dispute – who wins?

Posted on 28/03/2013 | 10 comments

By Tony Collins

Somerset County Council has settled a High Court legal dispute with IBM-led Southwest One. It will bring some services back in-house.

The Conservative leader of Somerset council John Osman said, “This agreement will save Somerset residents millions of pounds and will make the contract fit for the future.”

Osman added that the agreement involves settlement of Southwest One fees, which the council had been withholding, for a mutually- agreed sum.

“Most importantly the cancelling of the gainshare agreement will save Somerset County Council residents millions of pounds in the future as those sums can now be kept by the Council,” said Osman.

But as the deal includes payment of an undisclosed sum by the council to Southwest One it is unclear which side is the beneficiary in the dispute. [See Dave Orr comment on this post.]

The council says the settlement will bring benefits for the council including securing “greater strategic control and capacity back with SCC  in terms of Procurement, Property and ICT”.

The agreement also “removes some barriers to ensure successful delivery of our Change Programme – with greater alignment to the operating model, commissioning capacity, service reviews, and technology enablers.”

And the settlement allows officers to focus on improving services rather than on a series of disputes.

Southwest One had issued a writ against the council – what the authority calls a “substantial claim” – and a date for a High Court hearing was set provisionally for November 2013.  Yesterday [March 27 2013] the council agreed to settle the High Court claim, and an unspecified number of other disputes.   

IBM, Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, and Avon and Somerset Police set up Southwest One as a joint venture company in 2007.  IBM  owns 75% of the company.

Somerset’s officers said in a report yesterday:

“Following a series of discussions between the Council and Southwest One we are now in a position to settle the disputes and the Procurement legal proceedings against SCC will cease.

“The agreement includes a settlement payment to SWO which is substantially lower than the claim against SCC and releases payments to SWO that were held by SCC as part of the dispute.”

Somerset County Council will take back several services and about 100 people who had been seconded to Southwest One. The council says that taking back staff and services will “reduce the potential for further disputes and align those services much closer to the operating model the Council has adopted”.

Services returning to SCC include:

• Strategic and Operational Procurement
• Property Services
• Estates Management
• ICT Strategic Management including some web management posts
• Some business support posts for the above functions

The council says there will be little change in day to day activities and no changes to locations of staff. Somerset’s staff will have their secondments terminated and revert to the council’s terms and conditions.

The High Court action was because of a disagreement  about the quality of Southwest One’s procurement service and what payments Southwest One was entitled to as a result of savings made through the joint venture.

Secrecy

Whereas a High Court hearing would have been open to the public, the sum paid by Somerset to IBM as part of the settlement,  and the risks of bringing staff and services back in-house, are being kept confidential because of what the council calls “commercial sensitivity”.

Risks

Some of the settlement’s main risks for the council are listed in yesterday’s report:

• The confidential nature of the discussions held to secure an agreement has
meant that full consultation with a wide range of officers and partners has not
been possible.
• The transfers of staff and functions will take place during the new financial
year. The proposed transfers create some risk due to SAP changes required.
• There will be some risks in the hand-over of programmes of work.
• Despite all efforts to mitigate risks to services, it is possible that some
disruption may occur. Transition workshops are planned to identify and preempt such instances, which significantly reduces the risk.
• Implications for partners have also been estimated. It is possible that partners
may take a different view of the implications for them.

Blame

Osman blamed the previous Liberal Democrat administration for the problems which he said were owing to the way the contract was worded, the actions of the previous Lib Dem administration transferring services to Southwest One that should never have transferred and the failure to clarify the savings sharing element of the agreement. Osman said this was the “equivalent of the Lib Dems writing a blank cheque”.

The 10-year joint venture, which started in 2007, will continue. 

Comment:

As the terms of the settlement and the risks associated with transferring staff and services back in-house are being kept secret nobody outside an inner circle of the council can know how bad the joint venture and the dispute have been for Somerset council’s taxpayers.

If anything is clear it is that IBM held the dominant legal hand all along. It issued a High Court claim, and now it has received a payment from the council.

It seems to be a feature of big council outsourcing deals and joint ventures that councillors are easily swayed by promises of enormous savings, often upfront savings, and are not too concerned about the risk of things going wrong because they won’t be in office when or if any mud hits the fan.

Yesterday Cornwall Council’s Interim CEO, along with the Chairman of Cornwall Partnership Foundation Trust and the Director of Finance at Peninsula Community Health signed a contract for a joint venture with BT.

As Andrew Wallis, an independent councillor in Cornwall, says

“Lets hope the Council does not regret this day.”

The Southwest One joint venture was flawed joint venture from the time a rushed contract riddled with literals was signed in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2007.  For years afterwards, Somerset Council has been trying to dig itself out of a hole. It is now near the surface – except that yesterday’s council report says there is a potential for further disputes. 

Will other councils learn from Somerset’s experiences? Cornwall’s deal shows that any learning will be very limited.

And the secrecy that tends to go with big outsourcing deals and joint ventures means that a small group of councillors can sign joint ventures and outsourcing contracts without proper accountability  – and can settle any legal disputes later without accountability, and indeed with impunity.

Whenever a  major supplier offers a council large upfront savings from an outsourcing deal or a joint venture why would the authority’s inner circle of councillors say no?

Thank you to campaigning Somerset resident and former county council employee Dave Orr who provided the links and information that made this post possible.

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Posted in Campaign4Change, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, law, legal disputes, local government, managing change, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, SAP, supplier relationships

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Francis Maude –“unacceptable” civil service practices

Posted on 21/03/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Francis Maude laments civil service inaction over a cabinet committee mandate for centralising procurement. It “corrodes trust in the system”.

Gus O’Donnell, the former head of the civil service,  confronted Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of civil service reform, on BBC R4’s In Defence of Bureaucracy last week.

The irreconcilable differences between O’Donnell and Maude were obvious and may be a sign of how difficult it will be for the minister to make lasting and deep cuts in IT-based spending, simplify overly complex processes, and reduce duplication.

O’Donnell spoke of the virtues of the civil service that have served the country for more than a century, particularly its impartiality.  But Maude said the “value of impartiality can sometimes turn into indifference”.

O’Donnell said: “We need to be proud and passionate about the public sector ethos…” and confronted Maude for saying things about the civil service “that are not always totally positive”.

Indeed Maude said,

“Most of the civil servants I deal with are terrific, work hard and do really good work.  It is not universal.”

O’Donnell then confronted Maude for saying that ministers in this and previous government have too often found that decisions they have made don’t get implemented. Is that the fault of ministers or civil servants, asked O’Donnell.

“I’d be astonished if it’s ministers,” said Maude who added,

“ I had a meeting the other day around this table …  where a decision was made by a cabinet committee, more than a year ago, on the centralising of procurement. It had happened to a very minimal extent.

“If there is a problem with it, that can be flagged up and tell us. Just to go away and not do it is unacceptable … it is protection of the system. This is the speaking truth unto power thing. What is unacceptable is not to challenge a ministerial position but then not to implement it. That is what corrodes trust in the system.”

About £230bn a year – nearly a third of everything government spends – is on public sector procurement.  In 2010, Nigel Smith, then CEO of the Office of Government Commerce, spoke to the “Smartgov” conference about the need for major reform in the way government buys things.

He spoke of the need for re-useable software, open source if possible, and said that suppliers regularly use fragmentation within government to maximise profits. “This has got to change,” says Smith.

He said there were 44,000 buying organisations in the public sector which buy “roughly the same things, or similar things, in basic commodity categories” such as IT and office supplies.

Massive duplication

He spoke of “massive duplication”, high tendering costs on suppliers, and a loss of value due to a lack of true aggregation. He said suppliers had little forward look of opportunities to tender and offer innovative solutions for required outcomes.

“Contract management with supplier relationship management is inconsistent, with too little attention paid to continuous improvement and benefits capture within contract.

“The opportunity to improve outcomes and efficiency gains should not be constrained by contract terms and innovations should not stop at the point of contract signature.

“If we miss this opportunity [to reform] we need shooting.”

So it is clear procurement [and much else] needs reforming. But in the R4 broadcast last week (which unfortunately is no longer available) O’Donnell portrays a civil service that is almost as good as it gets.

He speaks of its permanence in contrast to transient ministers. His broadcast attacks the US system of government in which public service leaders change every time there is a new government.  The suggestion is that the US system is like a ship that veers crazily from side to side, as one set of idealogues take the captain’s wheel from another. O’Donnell implies that in the UK civil service stability lasts for decades, even centuries.

The virtues he most admires in the UK civil service are what he calls the 4 “Ps” – Pace, Passion, Professionalism and Pride.  His broadcast speaks of the UK civil service as a responsible, effective, continual and reliable form of administration.  

Comment

O’Donnell’s most striking criticism of Maude’s intended reforms of central government goes to the heart of what Maude is trying to do: change what is happening in departments.

When, in the broadcast, Maude suggested that civil servants were not challenging ministerial decisions and were not implementing them either, O’Donnell replied that Maude was “overstating the issue”. But O’Donnell went much further and added a comment that implied Maude should leave departments alone.

O’Donnell said

“These sorts of problems mainly arise when ministers at the centre of government want to impose their will on secretaries of state who want to be left alone to run their departments as they see fit.”

Is O’Donnell giving permanent secretaries and departmental ministers his support if they continue to snub Cabinet Office reforms?

It is hardly surprising Maude is a bundle of frustrations. Central government administration cannot be reformed if departments have the autonomy to refuse to implement decisions of a cabinet committee.

It is ironic that cabinet committee decisions are binding on the entire Cabinet – but not, it seems, on departments.

Perhaps the gap between political and civil service leaders at the centre, and senior civil servants in departments, is as irreconcilable as ever. Today’s UK civil service is more than ever “Yes Minister” without the jokes.  Should this be the dysfunctional basis for coalition reforms of central government?

Perhaps this explains why Maude is trying to implement open standards, make government procurement friendly to SMEs and encourage the use of G-Cloud while the Department for Work and Pensions and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are  agreeing new mega-contracts,  with the same handful of monolithic suppliers.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the current Cabinet Secretary,  is perhaps a little more Maude-friendly than O’Donnell when he says in the R4 broadcast,

“There are lots of things we need to do better. Too many projects that we undertake are delayed, are over budget and don’t deliver on all the benefits that were promised. We are not as digital as the most effective private sector organisations are. We have been slow to embrace the digital revolution.”

Fine words. But if a cabinet committee’s decision on centralising procurement has little effect, how is Sir Jeremy going to convert his words into action? Or Francis Maude’s?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud, Cloud Computing, collaboration, compliance with spending review, cost reduction, EU procurement, G-Cloud, governance, government, Government digital Service, Government IT, IT-related failures, open source, open standards, Politics, procurement, project management, reducing cost strategically, SME, supplier relationships, US Government

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Cornwall Council rushes to sign BT outsourcing deal before elections

Posted on 08/03/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Cornwall council logoCornwall Council was a model of local democracy in the way it challenged and then rejected a large-scale outsourcing plan. Now it has gone to the other extreme.

Amid extraordinary secrecy the Council’s cabinet is rushing through plans to sign a smaller outsourcing contract with BT – a deal that will include IT – before the May council elections.

Councillors who have been given details are not allowed to discuss them. No figures are being given on the costs to the council, or the possible savings. The Council’s cabinet is not releasing information on the risks.

Councillors are being treated like children, says ThisisCornwall. Documents with details of the BT outsourcing plans have to be handed back by councillors, and cabinet papers are being printed individually with members’ names as a watermark, on every page, to guard against copying and to help identify any whistleblowers.

The council’s Single Issue Panel has a timetable for the IT outsourcing plan.

– Recommendation to Cabinet to approve release of ITT – 27 February 2013

– Evaluation of bid – March 2013

– If contract awarded, commencement of implementation work – April 2013

– Staff transfer date – July 2013

The SIP report emphasises that the timetable for signing a deal is tight. “Evidence received is that there is little room for slippage in the timetable, but that potential award of contract is achievable by the end of March 2013… It is expected that a contract could be ready to be issued as part of the ITT [invitation to tender] pack by early in the week commencing 4 March 2013.”

The SIP report concedes that the plan is “fast moving”.

In the past, the SIP group of councillors has been open and challenging in its reports on the council’s plans with BT (and CSC before the company withdrew from negotiations). Now the SIP’s latest report is vague and unchallenging. The risks are referred to in the report as a tick-box exercise. Entire paragraphs in the SIP report appear to have little meaning.

“Risk log and programme timelines are reviewed and updated on a regular basis… 

“The Council and health partners have been working on and have reached agreement on their positions in relation to commercial aspects in the contract and their expectations have been part of the dialogue with BT.”

“Previous concerns of the Panel relating to the area of new jobs have been addressed with BT in contract discussions and contract clauses have been revised to reflect this…”

It is also unclear from the SIP report why the council is outsourcing at all, only perhaps a hint that the deal will be value for money.

“The contract will be fully evaluated by the Head of Finance and her team to ensure value for money once the final bid is received. No savings have been assumed for 2013/14 budgetary purposes, although there are assumptions of savings for the indicative figures for future years,” says the SIP report.

Comment

It is a pity that Cornwall Council’s cabinet is rushing to sign a deal for which it won’t be accountable if things go wrong. In a few weeks a new council will be voted in and, if the outsourcing deal with BT ends up in a dispute or litigation, the new council will simply blame the old, as happened when Somerset County Council’s joint venture deal with IBM, Southwest One, went into dispute.

In essence, with the local elections only two months away, Cornwall Council’s cabinet has a freedom to make whatever decision it likes with impunity; and it appears to be taking that freedom to an extreme, almost to the point of sounding, in the latest SIP report, as if the council is an arms-length marketing agent of BT.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet has a mandate from the full council to move to a contract with BT. The full council has voted to “support” a deal. But that vote was a mandate to negotiate, not to sign anything BT wants to sign.

Openness has gone out of the window and BT, it seems, is no longer being rigorously  challenged – by Cornwall’s cabinet, the full council, the public or the media.

How exactly can BT guarantee jobs and make savings? We don’t know. The Cabinet isn’t saying, and its members are doing all they can to stop councillors saying.

Are BT’s promises reliant on the fact that IT is subject to constant and sometimes costly change – often unforeseen change – and that is bound to continue, at least in the form of supporting changing legislation and reorganisations?

Unforeseen changes could add unforeseen costs which the council may have to pay because IT is at the heart of business continuity.  In any dispute with the council  – and BT knows its way around the world of contested contracts – the company would have the upper hand because of its experience with litigation and the fact that the council would need undisrupted IT at a time of change and could not afford, without risk, to take the service back in-house.

We have seen how normality broke down at Mid Staffs NHS Foundation Trust amid a lack of openness and excessive defensiveness;  and we have seen, in Somerset County Council’s joint venture with IBM, Southwest One, what can happen when a contract signing is rushed.

Cornwall Council’s cabinet is doing both. It is rushing to sign a contract; and it is rushing to sign it amid excessive secrecy.

Surely Cornwall Council can do better than slip into the shadows to sign a deal with BT before the council elections in May?  If it is such a good deal, the new council will want to sign it. A new council should have the chance to do so.

For Cornwall Council to outsource now what is arguably its single most important internal resource – IT – is bad for local democracy: it is snub to anyone who holds true the idea that local councillors are accountable to local people.

Thank you to campaigner Dave Orr who drew my attention to information that made this post possible.

* Cornwall Council, by the way, has one of the best local authority websites I have seen.  If the website is a reflection of the imagination and efficiency of its IT department, Cornwall Council should be selling its IT skills to BT for a small fortune – not giving staff away.

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, change management, excessive secrecy, IBM, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships

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Shouldn’t David Nicholson stay?

Posted on 06/03/2013 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Sir David Nicholson seems to have a glass half-full view of life as the Chief Executive of the NHS. Perhaps unfairly there are calls for him to resign over the deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.  He says he did not know what was happening there.

But he was wrong to suggest the problems at Mid-Staffs were not systemic. Fourteen hospitals are being investigated for unusually high death rates.

Nicholson was also wrong in 2007 when he gave a reassuring briefing to the then prime minister Tony Blair on the state of the National Programme for IT. The paper on which his briefing was based was supposed to have been a secret but it was mistakenly put on the web then removed. I kept a copy.

It showed a bar chart that implied that the main elements of the NPfIT were complete.  It said that,

“ … much of the programme is complete with software delivered to time and to budget”.

That wasn’t correct then, or today – which is six years later. The main element of the NPfIT, a national electronic health record, does not exist. Arguably the NPfIT is one of the worst IT-related disasters of all time – and Sir David Nicholson remains its official Senior Responsible Owner. He has defended the NPfIT even after coalition ministers criticised it.

He also personally rejected a call by 23 academics in 2006 for an independent review of the NPfIT. When I was in his company a few years ago he said (politely) that he would not put the idea of an independent review to his ministers.

So why shouldn’t he go? The resignation of one man over pervasive cultural problems within the NHS could be an irrelevance, a harmful distraction. It could imply that the NHS is cured of the pervasive cultural problems highlighted by Francis in his report on Mid Staffs.

Perhaps Nicholson should stay because he is a reminder that the health service’s senior management doesn’t really change however many times new governments impose reorganisations. Particularly at trust board level directors keep the same principles of defensiveness and denial when things go wrong. Nicholson, perhaps, should remain as a symbol of what is wrong with the NHS.

If he resigned, his successor would most likely be appointed by a panel that would be attracted to the virtues Nicholson displayed at his interviews for the job of NHS Chief Executive. In other words Nicholson may be replaced by someone very similar – someone who would, at heart, defend the NHS, and particularly the Department of Health, against whinging outsiders including politicians, the media and patients.

Does a Mid Staffs culture still pervade the NHS?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, culture, e-health, excessive secrecy, health, health records, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency

Universal Credit and Pitchford – good move or a potential conflict of interest?

Posted on 21/02/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed that the executive director of the Major Projects Authority, David Pitchford, is to take interim charge of the delivery of Universal Credit, starting this week, says Government Computing.

Pitchford will stay initially for a three-month stint until a permanent replacement is appointed. He joins DWP’s CIO Andy Nelson, who was previously at the Ministry of Justice,  in helping to oversee the Universal Credit project.

Pitchford and Nelson are jointly taking the place of Philip Langsdale, DWP’s highly respected CIO, who passed away just before Christmas last year.

The Daily Telegraph and Independent have portrayed Pitchford’s appointment as a sign that Universal Credit is in trouble. The Telegraph’s headline on Monday was

Welfare reforms in doubt as troubleshooter takes over

And the Independent reported that:

“Ministers have been forced to draft in one of the Government’s most experienced trouble-shooters to take charge of the troubled Universal Credit programme – amid fears the complex new system could backfire.”

But DWP officials say Pitchford’s appointment is not a sign Universal Credit is behind schedule.

A DWP spokesperson said, “David Pitchford will be temporarily leading Universal Credit following the death of Philip Langsdale at Christmas. This move will help ensure the continued smooth preparation for the early rollout of Universal Credit in Manchester and Cheshire in April. A recruitment exercise for a permanent replacement will be starting shortly.”

In Pitchford’s absence, the day-to-day running of the Major Projects Authority will be handled by Juliet Mountford and Stephen Mitchell, with oversight from government chief operating officer Stephen Kelly. Pitchford will retain overall responsibility for the MPA’s activities, says Government Computing.

Comment

On the face of it Pitchford’s appointment is a clever move: the Cabinet Office now has a senior insider at the DWP who can report back on the state of the Universal Credit project.

Francis Maude, who is the Cabinet Office minister in change of efficiency and is trying to distance the government from from Labour’s IT disasters, is almost openly worried about the smell that could come from a failure of the Universal Credit project.

DWP secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith keeps reassuring his ministerial colleagues that critics are ill-formed and all is well with the project. But it is not clear whether he has an overly positive interpretation of the facts or understands the complexities of the project and all that could go wrong.

Even officials at HMRC are having difficulty understanding some of the detailed technical lessons from the work so far on RTI – Real-time information. Although RTI does not need Universal Credit to succeed, Universal Credit is dependent on  RTI.

With  much conflicting information within government over the state of the Universal Credit project – which is compounded by DWP’s refusal under FOI to publish several consultancy reports it has commissioned on the scheme – it is useful for the Cabinet Office to have the highly experienced and much respected Australian David Pitchford run Universal Credit. 

Pitchford is a much-valued civil servant in part because he is straight-talking. He said in  2011 that government projects failed because of:

– 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 he made this speech, and it was reported, Pitchford has become a little more guarded about what he says in public. The longer he stays in the innately secretive UK 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.

Potential for a conflict of interest?

The Major Projects Authority exists to provide independent oversight of big projects that could otherwise fail. Regularly it is  in polite conflict with departments over the future direction of questionable projects and indeed whether they should come under the scrutiny of the MPA at all.

Pitchford’s taking over of Universal Credit, even on an interim basis, raises questions about whether he can ever  be seen in future as an independent scrutineer of the project. According to The Independent, Pitchford will report directly to Iain Duncan Smith – bypassing the DWP’s permanent secretary Robert Devereux.

Once his secondment to the DWP ends Pitchford may wish to criticise aspects of the project. Can he do so with the armour of independence having run the project? Would he have the authority to delay Universal Credit’s introduction?

Pitchford is now an integral part of Universal Credit. He is in the position of the local government ombudsman who is seconded to a local authority, or an auditor at the National Audit Office who sits on the board of a government department.  If a big project at the department goes wrong, the permanent secretary can say to the NAO:  “Well you had a representative on our board. Are you in a position to criticise us?”

The MPA does a good job largely because it is independent of departments. There are signs that it is intervening to stop failing projects or put them on a more secure footing. Can the MPA remain independent of departments if its head has been seconded to a department?

On the other hand Francis Maude is likely to receive an account of how Universal Credit is going. And the Universal Credit project will have the benefit of an external, independent scrutineer as its head.

But if the MPA and Universal Credit are inextricably linked how can the MPA do its job of being an independent regulator of big IT projects including Universal Credit?

Pitchford takes on Universal Credit role

Government brings in troubleshooter to get Universal Credit on track.

Welfare reforms in doubt after troubleshooter takes over

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Government IT, HMRC, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Don’t fire staff before going live – lessons from a SAP project failure

Posted on 13/02/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

When an NHS chief executive spoke at a conference in Birmingham about how he’d ordered staff cuts in various departments in advance of a patient administration system going live – to help pay for the new system – it rang alarm bells.  

This is because more staff are usually needed to cope with extra workloads and unexpected problems during and after go-live. That’s a lesson BT and CSC gradually learned from Cerner and Lorenzo go-lives under the National Programme for IT. It’s also a lesson from some of the case studies in “Crash”.

The trust chief executive who was making the speech was managing his go-live outside of the NPfIT. He didn’t seem to realise that you shouldn’t implement savings in advance of a go-live, that the go-live is likely to cost much more than expected, and that, as a chief executive, he shouldn’t over-market the benefits of the new system internally. Instead he should be honest about life with the new system. Some things will take longer. Some processes will be more laborious.

Bull-headed

If the chief executive is bull-headedly positive and optimistic about the new IT his board directors and other colleagues will be reluctant to challenge him. Why would they tell him the whole story about the new system if he’d think less of them for it? They would pretend to be as optimistic and gung-ho as he was. And then his project could fail.

Much of this I said when I approached the trust chief executive after his speech. It wasn’t any of my business and he’d have been justified in saying so. But he listened and, as far as I know, delayed the go-live and applied the lessons.

Disaster

Now a SAP project disaster in the US has proved a reminder of the need to have many extra people on hand during and after go-live – and that go-live may be costlier and more problem-laden than expected.

The Post-Standard reported last month that a $365m [£233m] system that was intended to replace a range of legacy National Grid’s payroll and finance IT has led to thousands of employees receiving incorrect payments and delayed payments to suppliers. Some employees were not paid at all and the company ended up issuing emergency cheques.

Two unions issued writs on behalf of unpaid workers, and the Massachusetts attorney general fined National Grid $270,000 [£172,500] for failing to comply with wage laws. New York’s attorney general subpoenaed company records to investigate.

Hundreds assigned to cope with go-live aftermath

National Grid spokesman Patrick Stella said the company has assigned hundreds of employees, including outside contractors, to deal with problems spawned by the new system. Many of them have been packed into the company’s offices in Syracuse in the state of New York. Others are dispersed to work at “payroll clinics,” helping employees in crew barns or other remote locations.

For more than a year National Grid worked to develop a new system to consolidate a patchwork of human resource, supply chain and finance programs it inherited from the handful of U.S. utilities it has acquired. The system, based on SAP, cost an estimated $365m, according to National Grid regulatory filings.

Stella said the glitches to be expected when a complex new system goes live were exacerbated in the wake of Sandy, when thousands of employees worked unusual hours at unusual locations. “It would have been challenging without Hurricane Sandy,” Stella said.

SAP software woes continue to plague National Grid.

Payroll blunder.

National Grid struggles to fix payroll problems.

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, CSC, IT projects, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, SAP

Parts of report on Cornwall’s planned BT joint venture are missing

Posted on 06/12/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Cornwall Council’s officers have written a 134-page report on the options available to councillors for confronting budget cuts.

It will help councillors  decide at a full council meeting on 11 December whether to ask officers to conclude a joint venture with BT.

The report “Partnership for Support Services – Options Appraisal” is clearly a well-meant attempt to convince councillors that the best option is a deal with BT. The current plan is for BT to set up a subsidiary it would own completely, that would deliver ICT and other services back to the council and parts of the local NHS. BT has no plans for the council to be represented on the subsidiary’s board.

The new report is strong on the benefits of a joint venture with BT, such as guaranteed jobs and savings. Absent, though, are  important parts on costs, risks and local authority experiences on joint ventures and private sector partnerships. 

Secret risks

The report says that the “risks inherent in SP 1 [the joint venture with BT] has been submitted to the Council” by legal firm Eversheds.  A final version of the Eversheds report will be signed off by council officers before any invitation to tender is issued to BT. But there’s no indication that this report on risks will be shown to all councillors.

Secret appendix 

The council’s own procurement costs relating to the proposed joint venture, and further projected costs, are escalating.

In July 2011 the costs to Cornwall’s taxpayers of planning the joint venture  were estimated at £375,000. That figure rose to £650,000, then to £800,000, then £1.8m and now stands at  £2.1m.

“The current forecast estimate of the costs of the procurement process now stands at £2.1m. This is funded from the corporate improvement budget,” says the new report.

There are further costs arising from the partnership, says the report. One example is the pension fund for the transfer of staff which will cost about £10m over 10 years.  “There will also need to be additional budget to create a robust client team [to manage the BT contract],” says the report. This would cost between £400,000 and £700,000 a year.

“Both of these additional costs have been taken into account in the option analysis contained in appendix 2.”

But appendix 2 is missing in the public version of the report.

Also missing  

The report suggests that strategic partnerships are “nothing new”. It adds:

“BT – and other councils (sic) – have been involved in them for more than 10 years. Similarly the outsourcing market is mature and well understood. The UK local government IT and Business Process Outsourcing market is the biggest outsourcing market in the world and there are over 100 deals in operation. Risks are sometimes managed well and sometimes managed badly. The risks have been mitigated by using expert advisors and the Council has senior officers who understand this territory well.”

But the report does not mention that some councils in the mature local authority market have, after poor experiences, outcast joint ventures and one-size-fits-all outsourcing deals. Neither does it mention that the Cabinet Office disapproves of partnerships that lock public sector organisations into one major supplier.

These are some of the partnerships not mentioned in Cornwall’s report:

– Suffolk County Council signed a £330m joint venture deal with BT in 2004. By late 2010 the cost had risen 26% to £417m.  A BT spokesman told  the Guardian that the additional costs were due to “…additional services contracted by the council”.  Suffolk has decided not to renew the BT contract. It will instead outsource to separate specialist firms. Assistant director director strategic finance Aidan Dunn said in a council report that “efficiencies can be achieved by dealing with individual suppliers who are experts in specific areas of back office service provision, rather than contracting with back office generalists”.

He added: “Our analysis suggests that it is not necessary to have one large contract, but that our requirements would best be serviced via three separate contracts: finance and HR, ICT and services to schools.”

– Somerset County Council’s loss-making joint venture is in dispute with its main supplier IBM. Council leader Ken Maddock said the joint venture was “failing to be flexible enough in the changing financial landscape”.  He did not blame the workforce but the “contract, the complications, the failed technology, the missed opportunities, the lack of promised savings”.

– Birmingham City Council is, in effect, locked into a “Services Birmingham” contract with Capita that began in 2006 and lasts for another nine years. The contract has been largely successful but the relationship is deteriorating in some areas, according to a report which was published this week.  The two sides have many problems to overcome.

– Essex County Council has taken civil legal dispute advice over its deal with BT. The European Services Strategy Unit quotes the Financial Times as saying that a 10-year contract began 2002 but in January 2009 Essex Council served BT with a notice of material breach of contract. A spokeswoman for the council said: “We decided it wasn’t value for money and we weren’t getting the level of service we required, so we decided to terminate the contract.”

Analysis of other parts of latest Cornwall report

The options appraisal report says it was produced in a tight timeframe which has limited its usefulness to councillors. But who has imposed a tight timeframe? Councillors have not imposed any specific time limit. It could be that some council officers have. But aren’t artificial time limits usually the prerogative of double-glazing salesmen who offer 60% off if you sign straight away? Cornwall’s report says:

“… it is recognised that the necessity for the Chief Executive to fulfil the mandate of Council in such a tight timeframe means that it has been difficult in terms of ensuring full Member engagement…

” … As stated, the timeframe has been particularly challenging and the report would have benefited from more discussions with and input from Members but it is hoped that the Council has sufficient analysis and background information to make a decision on the best way forward.”

Health partners

The report says of the council’s three proposed health partners that “all are keen to promote closer integration, improve services and deliver savings through the SP 1 [BT joint venture] proposal”.

This isn’t quite what “all” the health partners said.

Kevin Baber, chief executive of Peninsula Community Health in St Austell said the only realistic option was a BT joint venture (though the authority has begun telehealth talks outside the partnership). The other two health authorities were not so definite in their support for a BT joint venture – and one of them  wished expressly not to influence Cornwall Council’s debate.

Lezli Boswell, Chief Executive of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, said:

“It would not be appropriate for me to comment on the Options Appraisal as [the trust] has not been involved in the preparations process and also would not want to appear to be influencing the Council’s debate…”

Phil Confue, chief executive of Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said that the option for a BT joint venture appeared to offer to a real opportunity  to deliver value for money. But he made no commitment to the partnership even if Cornwall votes in favour of a deal with BT.  He said the trust did not want, as an NHS body, to lobby the council over its decision.

“The decision whether to pursue the Strategic Partnership will be made by
our Trust Board of Directors, once the Council has made its decision on the 11 December 2012.”

As the Cornwall options appraisal report concedes, health trusts have the option of outsourcing services to Shared Business Services, a successful shared services organisation run by Steria.

Comment:

Most of the councils that went into joint ventures with high hopes amid promises of large savings have become disillusioned. Such deals are characterised by an anxiety for a deal to be signed as soon as possible, followed by rising costs, lack of flexibility, high prices when there is a need for major legislative and organisational change, and the discovery that ending a contract early carries risks of disruption to services, high re-transitional expenses, legal action and sunk costs.

Some may wonder if the unforeseen rising costs of procurement – they have increased five-fold – may be a sign of what could happen with costs after a contract is in place.

Given the lessons from the growing number of joint venture failures, one would have thought that council officers would be suspicious of supplier promises.  Not at Cornwall. The officer-enthusiasts for the BT deal don’t mention any of the joint venture contracts that have failed. Indeed those officers prefer the claims of suppliers that failures are in the eyes of trouble-makers, media scaremongers and union activists.

Why does so much enthusiasm at the start of contracts dissipate once realities set in? Could it be that the best marketing people are the easiest to sell to? Do the officials that want success so much overlook or minimise the risks and past poor experiences of others?

Links to Cornwall Council’s options appraisal and agenda for 11 December council meeting on the blog of campaigner Cornwall councillor Andrew Wallis.

Cornwall’s joint venture procurement costs escalate

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, IT-related failures, local democracy, local government, managing outsourced services, outsourcing, Politics, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, shared services, supplier relationships

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