When “life and death” NHS IT goes down

Posted on 29/01/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Almost unnoticed outside the NHS an email was circulated by health officials last weekend about a national “severity 1” incident involving the Electronic Prescription Service, running on BT’s data Spine .

“The EPS [electronic prescriptions service] database is currently experiencing severe degradation of performance. … BT engineers [are] currently investigating with the database application support team,” said the email.

A severity 1 or 2 incident, which involves a temporary loss of, or disruption to, the Spine or other national NHS system,  is not unusual, according to a succession of emails forwarded to Campaign4Change.

The Department of Health defines a severity 1 incident as a  failure that has the potential to:

— have a significant adverse impact on the provision of the service to a large number of users; or

— have a significant adverse impact on the delivery of patient care to a large number of patients; or

— cause significant financial loss and/or disruption to NHS Connecting for Health [now the Health and Social Care Information Centre], or the NHS; or

— result in any material loss or corruption of health data, or in the provision of incorrect data to an end user.

The Health and Social Care Information Centre, which manages BT’s Spine and other former NPfIT contracts, reports that the spine availability is 99.9% or 100%. But the HSCIC’s emails tell a story of service outage or disruption that is almost routine.

If the spine and other national services  are really available 99.9% of the time, is that good enough for the NHS, especially when ministers and officials are increasingly expecting clinicians and nurses to depend on electronic patient records and electronic prescriptions?  In short, are national NHS IT systems up to the job?

NHS staff access the spine tens of millions of times every month, often to trace patients before accessing their electronic records.  The spine is pivotal to the use of patient records held on Rio and Cerner Millennium systems in London. It is critical to the operation of Choose and Book, the Summary Care Record, Electronic Prescription Service pharmacy systems, GP2GP, iPM/Lorenzo, and the Personal Demographics Service.

According to a Department of Health letter sent to the Public Accounts Committee, payments to BT for the Spine totalled £1.08bn by March 2013.

BT says on its website that its 10-year NHS Spine contract involves developing systems and software to support more than 899,000 registered NHS users. The HSCIC says the Spine is used and supported 24 hours a day, 365 days a day.

“There is a huge amount of industrial-strength robustness, availability, disaster recovery, that you cannot get someplace else,” said a BT executive when he appeared before MPs in May 2011.

Life and death  

Sir David Nicholson spoke of the importance of the spine and other national NHS systems at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee in 2011. He said they were

“providing services that literally mean life and death to patients today … So the Spine, and all those things, provides really, really important services for our patients…”

When Croydon Health Services NHS Trust went live with a Cerner Millennium patient records system at the end of September a “significant network downtime” – of BT’s N3 network – had an effect on patients.

A trust board paper, dated 25 November 2013 says:

“CRS Millennium (Cerner) Deployment -Network downtime – Week 1.  In particular, the significant network downtime in week 1 (BT N3 problem) led to no electronic access to Pathology and Radiology which resulted in longer waits for patients in the Emergency Department (ED) leading to a large number of breaches. This was a BT N3 problem which has been rectified with BT …”

Below are some of the emails passed to Campaign4Change in the past four months. Written by the Health and Social Care Information, the emails alert NHS users to outages or disruption to GP or national NHS IT systems.

Some HSCIC messages of disruption to service

October 2013

Severity 2
HSCIC
National
CQRS has not received a number of participation status messages.
Also affecting: GPES
USER IMPACT:
CQRS Users are not able to manually submit specific information, this will impact the users’ business process for entry of achievement data.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
Following a configuration change by the GPES Business Unit a specific code has now been added to the GPET-Q Database. We are currently awaiting confirmation that the addition of the relevant code has been successful. Discussions are taking place regarding the re-submission of status messages. HSCIC conference calls are on-going.

[A severity 2 service failure is a failure [that] has the potential to:

– have a significant adverse impact on the provision of the service to a small or moderate number of service users; or

– have a moderate adverse impact on the delivery of patient care to a significant number of service users; or

– have a significant adverse impact on the delivery of patient care to a small or moderate number of patients; or

– have a moderate adverse impact on the delivery of patient care to a high number of patients; or

– cause a financial loss and/or disruption … which is more than trivial but less severe than the significant financial loss described in the definition of a Severity 1 service failure.]

**

Severity 2
HSCIC
BT Spine
National
Intermittent performance issues on TSPINE.
T-Spine
RESOLUTION:
BT Spine have confirmed that the incident has been resolved and users are able to perform routine business processes without delays.

November 2013

Severity 1
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Users are unable to log into PDS.
USER IMPACT:
All sites are currently unable to access PDS, this is causing a delay to normal services.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
BT Spine are working to restore service.

**

Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National EPS users.
Slow performance on reliable and unreliable messages for EPS.
USER IMPACT:
This is causing delays to routine business processes as some users may be experiencing slow performance with the EPS service.
BT investigating.

**

Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Slow performance on EPS Messaging.
USER IMPACT:
This is causing delays to routine business processes as some users may be experiencing slow performance with the EPS service.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
BT moved the database to an alternate node following application server restarts. This temporarily restored normal message response times however performance has started to degrade again. BT Investigation continues.

**
Severity 1
Atos
HSCIC
National
Multiple users were unable to log in to the Choose & Book application.
ATOS made some network configuration changes overnight 19th/20th November which restored service. After a period of monitoring throughout the day yesterday the service has remained stable and at expected levels. Further activities and investigation will be carried out by several resolver teams which will be scheduled through change management.

**
Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Slow performance on EPS Messaging.
No further issues of slow response times with EPS messaging have occurred today. BT Spine to continue root cause investigation.

**

Severity 2
Cegedim RX
HSCIC
National
Cegedim RX – Users are experiencing slow performance in EPS 1 and EPS 2.
USER IMPACT:
Users are experiencing slow performance and delays to routine business processes when using EPS 1 and EPS 2.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
Following a restart of application services, traffic has improved for all new EPS messages. However there is a backlog of EPS messages which may cause delays to routine business processes. Cegedim RX to continue to investigate.

**

December 2012

Severity 1
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Performance issues have been detected with the transaction messaging system (TMS).
Also affecting: Choose and Book, GP2GP
USER IMPACT:
This may cause delays to routine business processes. This may have an effect on all Spine related systems. This includes PDS, Choose and Book, PSIS, SCR, ACF Services.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
This has been resolved but BT are currently monitoring performance. Further investigation is required by BT into the root cause.

**

Severity 2
GDIT – CQRS
HSCIC
National
DTS has not processed a CQRS payment file.
CQRS
Also affecting: GPES
USER IMPACT:
This is causing delays to routine business processes.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
GDIT are currently developing a fix which will be rolled out tomorrow evening, pending successful testing.

January 2014

Severity 1
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
TMS reliable messaging unavailable.
USER IMPACT:
TMS reliable messaging unavailable and users having to implement manual workarounds.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
Issues experienced due to a planned change overrunning, BT Spine continue to implement the transition activity in order to restore service.

**

Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Users have experienced intermittent issues with the creation and cancellation of smartcards in CMS [Card Management Service for managing smartcards].
CMS
USER IMPACT:
This is intermittently causing delays to routine business processes as some users have been unable to create, cancel, cut or print cards in CMS.
ACTION BEING TAKEN
Users may experience issues with the creation and cancellation of cards in CMS. BT have identified a fix for the issue which is currently undergoing testing prior to deployment into the live environment.

**

Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
The maternity browser was unavailable within NN4B.
RESOLUTION:
BT identified a problematic server which was recycled to restore system functionality.

**

Spine scheduled outage for essential maintenance activity.

During critical work to migrate to a new storage solution on Spine an issue was experienced on the Transaction Messaging Service (TMS) in September of this year. The issue resulted in BT failing over the TMS database from its usual site on Live B to Live A to restore service. The failover was completed well within the Service Level Agreement and no detrimental long term impacts to the service were incurred.

On the 15th January 2014 between approximately 22:00-23:30, HSCIC, in conjunction with BT, are planning to relocate the TMS database back to Live B, this is for several critical reasons:

  1. The issues experienced, which prompted the failover, are fully resolved and will not be experienced again as the storage migration work is now complete.
  2. The Spine service is designed to operate with all databases running on Live B so this work supports the optimum configuration for the service.
  3. Most critically the transition for all data on Spine to Spine2 has been designed to operate from a standby site with no live databases on it. Therefore to support the Spine2 transition this work is absolutely essential.

In order to facilitate a safe relocation of the database a 1.5 hour outage is required to TMS. The impact of this to Spine is significant and results in effectively an outage for Spine and its interfaces to connecting systems for that period. The time and date is aimed at the lowest times of utilisation for Spine, to minimise impact to end users, as well as not impacting critical batch processing and Choose & Book slot polls.

 

Date & Time

Change Start Change Finish Services Affected Outage Duration
15/01/2013 22:00 15/01/2013 23:30 Transaction Messaging Service (TMS) 1.5 hours
Service  Impact Description
Choose and Book The Choose and Book service will be available but functionality will be limited until the TMS database has switched over.Users of the web application will experience limited retrievals during the outage window.The system will not be able to create shared-secret for patients who have not been referred via Choose and Book before.Service Providers will be unable to:

  • Perform clinic re-structures and re-arrange appointments for patients for directly bookable services
  • Send DNA messages to Choose and Book.

For directly bookable services the following functionality will be unavailable:

  • Booking appointments
  • Rearranging appointments
  • Creating new patient accounts

Choose & Book systems will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.

Due to the timing of the outage slot polls will not be affected.
Summary Care Record application (SCRa) The SCRa application will be available but functionality will be limited until the TMS database has switched over. Simple traces can be completed on PDS data but users will be unable to perform any PSIS updates (e.g. GP summary updates)
DSA The DSA application will be available but functionality will be limited until the TMS database has switched over.Simple traces can be completed on PDS data but users will be unable to perform any PSIS updates (e.g. GP summary updates).
Electronic Prescription Service (EPS)Pharmacy Systems Reliable messaging will be unavailable for the duration of the switchover work as the TMS service will be suspended dual site. All messages received from EPS systems will be rejected and not go into retry.EPS systems will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
EPS Batch The PPA response for any “claim” messages will not be sent to PPA/PPD. However, EPS will send those response(s) again when the retry jobs are re-activated after the switchover exercise is over. Response for any “claim” messages will not be received until after the switchover. Retry jobs will resend the responses once the TMS service is enabled.
Existing Service Providers (ESPs) There will be varying impacts depending on the product, release version and Spine compliant modules of the solution.ESP systems will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
GP2GP GP2GP will be unavailable until the TMS database has switched over.GP2GP systems will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
GP Extraction Service (GPES) GPES functionality will be unavailable until the TMS database has switched over.Messages will be queued on Spine and processed once the TMS service is restored.
GP Systems Functionality for Choose & Book, EPS and GP2GP, SCR will be limited until the TMS database has switched over.For Choose & Book directly bookable services the following functionality will be unavailable:

  • Booking appointments
  • Rearranging appointments
  • Creating new patient accounts

Systems will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
iPM/Lorenzo The real-time connection to Spine will be unavailable during the TMS outage. However both systems can be disconnected from Spine and operate without synchronised PDS data.iPM/Lorenzo will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
Millennium An outage of PDS reliable messaging will impact Millennium users.Users will be unable to:

  • trace patients
  • register new patients on PDS
  • book or reschedule appointments

Millennium will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
NN4B Trusts will need to be aware that during the outage NHS numbers cannot be generated, new-births cannot be registered and blood-spot labels cannot be generated and should plan accordingly.All birth notifications will be queued and processed once the TMS service is enabled.
Personal Demographics Service (PDS) Simple traces can be completed on PDS data.PDS reliable messaging will be unavailable until the TMS database has switched over.
RiO Users will be unable to:

  • trace patients
  • register new patients
  • book or reschedule appointments

The RiO system will need to queue the messages and resend to Spine once the TMS service is enabled.
TMS Event Service (TES) The majority of TES functionality will be unavailable during the outage.Trusts will need to be aware EPS, Death notifications, and Patient Care Provision Notifications (change of pharmacy) will be queued and sent to the receiving systems once the TMS service is restored.Any impacted notifications will be queued and sent to the receiving systems once TMS is restored.
TMS Batch (DBS, CHRIS, ONS) DBS will be unavailable until the TMS database has switched over (DBS processing will be suspended for the duration of the exercise).As the TMS switchover will be scheduled to start at 22:00, CHRIS batch should complete before the outage starts (CHRIS batch runs at 20:00 nightly).ONS processing will start at 18:00 nightly. If it doesn’t complete before 22:00, the messages will be queued and processed once the TMS service is restored.

**

Severity 2
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
Users are unable to grant worklist items within UIM.
USER IMPACT:
This is causing delays to routine business processes as users are unable to complete their worklist items within the UIM application.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
BT investigating.

**

Severity 1
BT Spine
HSCIC
National
The EPS database is currently experiencing severe degradation of performance.
USER IMPACT:
Delays to routine business processes.
ACTION BEING TAKEN:
BT engineers currently investigating with the database application support team.

Comment

David Nicholson is right. The NHS has become dependent on systems such as the Spine. But can doctors ever trust any aspect of the safety of patients to systems that are not available 24×7 as they need to be in a national health service?

It appears that BT and other suppliers have not been in breach of service level agreements, and the HSCIC has a good relationship with the companies.  But does the HSCIC have too great an interest in not finding fault with its suppliers or the contracts, for finding fault  could draw attention to any defects in a service for which the HSCIC is responsible?

Have national NHS IT suppliers a strong enough commercial or reputational interest  in avoiding  a disruption or loss of service, so long as they keep within their service level agreements? 

If nobody sees anything wrong with the reliability of existing national NHS IT services improvements are unlikely. Diane Vaughan’s book on the culture and organisation of NASA shows that experts in a big organisation can do everything right according to the rules  and procedures – and still have a disastrous outcome.

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Posted in Atos, BT, Campaign4Change, culture, Department of Health, e-health, Government IT, IT projects, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, Summary Care Record, supplier relationships

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MPs to question ex-BBC DG Mark Thompson on DMI failure

Posted on 28/01/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Public Accounts Committee plans next month to question the BBC’s former Director General Mark Thompson on the failure of the Digital Media Initiative. He left the BBC in 2012 and became CEO of the New York Times Company.

Margaret Hodge, chairman of the committee, said:

“I look forward to discussing this [DMI] with senior, and former senior, members of the BBC, such as former Director General Mark Thompson, when they come before us on Monday 3rd February at 3.15pm.”

Hodge said today’s National Audit Office memorandum on DMI “reads like a catalogue of how not to run a major programme”. She said she was shocked to learn how poor were the BBC’s governance arrangements for DMI.  “There was no Senior Responsible Owner with complete oversight of all aspects of programme’s delivery.”

The report clearly demonstrates why regular reviews are necessary – and why external reviewers should be listened to, said Hodge.

“If the BBC had established clearer accountability and stronger reporting it could have recognised the issues much earlier and set about minimising the astronomic losses for the licence fee payer.

“These failures go right to the top. The executive board applied insufficient scrutiny during 2011 and the first half of 2012. The programme was not subject to any audit or assurance reporting between early 2011 until July 2012.

“The BBC Trust had questioned the executive about slippages in September 2011 but then applied limited challenge until July 2012. After the BBC executive board became aware of the problems it initiated a review in May 2012 of the DMI timetable, costs and benefits.

“The BBC Trust finance committee did not know until July 2012 that the DMI’s risk rating had increased to red for the period October to December 2011.

“The BBC needs to learn from the mistakes it made and ensure that it never again spends such a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money with almost nothing to show for it.”

BBC’s Digital Media Initiative – another fine mess and predictable as well.

NAO memorandum on the DMI

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Posted in Campaign4Change

BBC’s DMI project – another fine mess that was predictable

Posted on 28/01/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

A National Audit Office memorandum published today on the BBC’s failed £125.9m Digital Media Initiative is a reminder – as in most failed big IT-enabled projects – that the causes have nothing to do with software and everything to do with management and people.

The NAO’s memorandum tells an all too familiar story with government IT (and the BBC is a public sector organisation):

– Over-optimism about the ability to implement

– Over-optimism about the ability to achieve the benefits

– Unclear requirements

– No thorough independent assessment of the technical design to see whether the DMI was technically sound

– The successful completion of the most straightforward of technology releases for the DMI, but these proved an unreliable indicator of progress.

– Technical problems and releases not meeting user expectations which contributed to repeated extensions to the timetable for completing the system, eroding user confidence and undermining the business case.

– Poor internal reporting. “The governance arrangements for the DMI were inadequate for its scale, complexity and risk. The BBC did not appoint a senior responsible owner to act as a single point of accountability and align all elements of the DMI. Reporting arrangements were not fit for purpose,” said the NAO.

– In the same way as the DWP failed with Universal Credit to take full account of recommendations in review reports, the BBC “did not adequately address issues identified by external reviewers during the course of the programme”.  The BBC had been aware that business requirements for the DMI were not adequately defined.

The BBC estimates that it spent £125.9m on the DMI. It offset £27.5m of spending on the DMI against transfers of assets, cash and service credits that formed part of its financial settlement with DMI’s previous developer Siemens. This left a net cost of £98.4m.

The BBC cancelled the DMI without examining the technical feasibility or cost of completing it, said the NAO.

The Corporation has written off the value of assets created by the programme, but is exploring how it can develop or redeploy parts of the system to support its future archiving and production needs.

Diane Coyle, Vice Chairman BBC Trust, said:

“We are grateful to the NAO for carrying out this report, which reinforces the conclusions of the PwC review commissioned by the Trust. It is essential that the BBC learns from the losses incurred in the DMI project and applies the lessons to running technology projects in future.

“The NAO’s findings, alongside PwC’s recommendations will help us make sure this happens. As we announced last December, we are working with the Executive to strengthen project management and reporting arrangements within a clearer governance system.  This will ensure that serious problems can be spotted and addressed at an earlier stage.”

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said today:

“The BBC Executive did not have sufficient grip on its Digital Media Initiative programme. Nor did it commission a thorough independent assessment of the whole system to see whether it was technically sound.

“If the BBC had better governance and reporting for the programme, it would have recognized the difficulties much earlier than May 2012.”

Comment

The DMI project is exemplar of all that tends to go wrong in big government IT-enabled projects. Strong independent oversight and independent reviews that were published would have provided the accountability to counterbalance over-optimism.  But these things never seems to happen.

There are also questions about why the BBC took on the project from Siemens  and turned what could have been a success into a financial disaster.

NAO memorandum on the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative

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Posted in change management, DWP, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing change, procurement, project management, public sector, PWC

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BBC World at One’s focus on Government IT

Posted on 28/01/2014 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

The lead item on BBC R4’s World at One on Friday was about Government IT contracts.

On the programme were the government’s Chief Procurement Officer Bill Crothers, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge, the UK IT Association, and me.

Some of the points made:

–  Bill Crothers gave an example of what he called “abuse” by some big IT suppliers. He said a young man who works for him lost his power cable. The supplier quoted £65 for a replacement. The price should have been £5 or £6.  When Crothers queried it, the supplier justified its price on grounds of security. Crothers could not believe that a power lead had security implications so he questioned the price again and received several pages of explanation from the supplier, which he did not read. Eventually the supplier “was good enough to reduce the price to £37”.

– HMRC was charged £30,000 for changing some text on its website.

– Francis Maude said a DWP team and a further 12 people from the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service had built – in only three months – a prototype of a digital solution to support the introduction of Universal Credit. The system cost just over £1m, he said. [Separately big IT suppliers at DWP have been paid £303m up to March 2013 for Universal Credit work.] Maude declined to predict the outcome of the “twin-track” work on the UC project.

– Some big legacy systems may soon need replacing – those that pay about £60bn a year in state pensions and collect nearly £100bn a year in VAT. “Those are going to be big projects,” said Margaret Hodge. “I don’t think we have seen the end of big projects, or the end of disasters.”

World at One in detail

Presenter Shaun Ley and BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins focused on government IT because of an announcement by the Cabinet Office that it is drawing the line on “bloated and wasteful IT contracts”. The Cabinet Office was pitching its announcement as marking a “massive change,” said Hawkins.

Ley said Francis Maude announced the safeguards  in an attempt to ensure that IT contracts don’t become multi-billion pound failures. He said that the abandoned NPfIT had cost close to £10bn.

Hawkins quoted the UK IT Association as saying that  government did not know how to do deals with smaller suppliers. On the government’s relationship with big suppliers UKITA said the government was like a “battered wife or husband who doesn’t seem to know how to leave.”

Appalling

Hawkins said Crothers has the air of a man going to war. Crothers’ conclusion on the way things are at the moment:

“This is about the oligopoly, the cluster of big suppliers that have had it took good for too long. It’s reflective of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour.  It is not acting as if they are in hungry and in a competitive market.  That’s appalling.”

Universal Credit

Hawkins asked Francis Maude how confident he was that what was being put in place on Universal Credit would work.

“I hope it will work,” said Maude. “The digital solution was created by a team within DWP with a dozen or so GDS [Government Digital Service] staff assisting.

“They created a working prototype for a digital solution within 3 months at a cost of only a bit over £1m. That certainly can be basis of a successful long-term solution.”

Hawkins [to Maude] “I asked you whether you were confident the approach with DWP would work and you said you hoped it would. That suggests to me that maybe you are not (confident).”

Maude: “N0-one knows with these things. Anyone who says you are certain everything is going to succeed … the way we do things now is build something quickly, test it, prove it, test it with users, and so you can’t have certainty about any of these outcomes.”

Outsourcing failures

Hawkins said “We have had story after embarrassing story about outsourcing failures [such as the] government being charged for tagging dead people … now ministers  have an interest in coming out on the front foot and just for once being on the attack and having a whack at the IT companies.

“You don’t need to be a political genius to work out why they would like to do that rather than be endlessly explaining themselves after embarrassing stories in the papers.”

Ley (to me): “Is this the best way to deal with the problems government has experienced? The journalist Tony Collins has written widely  about project failures in IT in both the public and private sectors.”

I replied that big companies have sometimes charged a lot to make small software changes.  The Cabinet Office’s “red lines” were a good idea though they were a formalising of restrictions that had been in place some time.

The Cabinet Office doesn’t have the power to make changes happen because departments are accountable to Parliament for their spend and so don’t want much interference from the Cabinet Office. But the Cabinet Office is right to try and reduce the amounts spent on big projects.

Ley: “What will be the effect of breaking up contracts?”

I said I hoped the Cabinet Office’s restrictions would bring about a change in culture in departments against the assumption that big is beautiful. Big projects should be split into components which would give SMEs a greater involvement and could reduce the risks of projects failing.

More project disasters?

Hodge gave her reaction to the Cabinet Office’s restrictions in the context of the Universal Credit project.

“Francis Maude and Cabinet Office have been trying really hard to get some sense into the way that project has developed. But sadly the news we have had lately suggests to me that they have failed. It is about £400m so far on IT.

“What went wrong there was that the department [DWP] thought it [UC] was a big IT project instead of thinking:  we are going to be changing our business; we are going to get 6 benefits rolled into one. They [the DWP] have not written off that money [£303m] which is what my committee thinks they should have done, because they want to save face. Down the line I think we’ll see some disasters there.

“There are a lot of projects around  government, what are called legacy projects, where old systems need to be replaced . They are big projects – pensions in DWP where £60bn is given out a year;  VAT receipts  in HMRC where nearly £100bn is collected. Those are going to be big projects. I don’t think we have seen the end of big projects, or the end of disasters.”

Ley: “What about breaking them up into smaller projects? Won’t that reduce potential risks?”

Hodge: “The important thing is what Tony Collins was saying to you. What we find is that the skills don’t exist within departments, either to commission the IT properly or to manage the suppliers once they have the IT in place.

“We are about to examine the army recruitment contract – I think that is what we’ll find.  The MoD hasn’t got the skills to manage it.

Ley: “Do you welcome the ending of automatic contract extensions?”

“I warmly welcome that. This is a small step in the right direction. Having an expert as we have in Bill Crothers in the Cabinet Office is really important. What we haven’t got are skills in the departments. It is not like a business. If it was, Bill Crothers would probably run IT across the whole of government. Our departments run in silos. They haven’t got the skills. They have this demand for big, big programmes in the future and I don’t think we have seen, sadly, the end of IT disasters.”

Update

Thank you to Dave Orr for drawing my attention to an excellent piece on the World at One item by procurement expert Peter Smith who concludes:

“… There is a big issue – large suppliers have not covered themselves in glory, but small suppliers just can’t develop huge systems for DWP or MOD.

“The large suppliers must have a role, but we have to manage these contracts better. And the answer can’t just be a small hit squad in Cabinet Office. This needs real capability development across government, which we haven’t really seen as yet in a coordinated fashion.”

BBC World at One – Government IT contracts

Bill Crothers on BBC Radio 4 – suppliers get another good kicking

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Posted in DWP, Government digital Service, Government IT, HMRC, IT projects, IT-related failures, managing outsourced services, MoD, npfit, outsourcing, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Did NPfIT flag-bearing trust lose track of 2,000 patients?

Posted on 23/01/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust is one of the most experienced Cerner Millennium electronic patient record user sites in England. It started using Cerner in 1999 for clinical documents, electronic orders and results, pathology, radiology and theatres.

In  2007 the trust became one of the first reference sites for the use of Cerner Millennium  within the National Programme for IT.

With BT’s help, and what the trust calls “full” funding, Barnet and Chase Farm implemented Millennium to support A&E, track patient notes and provide a master patient index. 

Millennium has also been used to support the production of waiting lists.  So why is the trust, with its exceptional IT experience, given a special mention today by the National Audit Office for having technology problems with its 18-week waiting lists?

Trust loses track of 108 patients waiting more than a year

In a report published today on 18-week waiting times – the right of patients to receive consultant-led care within 18 weeks of being referred for treatment, usually by their GP –  the NAO says:

“In May 2013, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust identified a failure to monitor more than 2,000 patients on the waiting list, of which 651 had waited between 18 and 51 weeks.

“The backlog developed as a result of a failure in an IT reporting system. At the time of the report to the board in May, there were no patients identified as waiting more than 52 weeks for treatment.

“However, further validation of the waiting list in July by trust staff identified 108 patients that had not been tracked and who had waited more than 52 weeks for treatment; these patients were subsequently reported to NHS England.

“In December 2013, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust had 181 patients who had waited more than 52 weeks for treatment…”

Responding to the NAO, officials at Barnet and Chase Farm said they had validated waiting times data, including for example: checks for missing services; changes in waiting list volumes; checks for missing clock starts; and reviewing a sample of patient files against recorded data.

Clinical harm?

But the full facts have not emerged. Two months ago the NHS Barnet CCG Board Governing Board Meeting decided to discuss in private Barnet and Chase Farm’s problems, which are not confined to meeting the 18-week list targets. The discussion went into the meeting’s  “part two” section.

In the open part of the meeting, it was reported to Board members that the Trust had reported a serious incident relating to a breach of access to 18 week pathways.

“The backlog position was 2613, patients waiting between 18 to 51 weeks with a
further 214 patients waiting in excess of 52 weeks. A Clinical Harm Steering Group has been set up by the Trust to review all patients affected by the RTT [referral to treatment] backlog.

“This group is being chaired by Henrietta Hughes, NHSE London region Medical Director who will be advising on the assessment of clinical harm…”

Board directors of Barnet and Chase Farm have discussed the 18-week waiting list problems – but in private.

Comment

Keeping track of patients once the 18-week countdown starts is difficult for any trust and Barnet and Chase Farm is not the only trust mentioned by the NAO as having problems.

It’s not always clear in what circumstances – and when – the clock starts on the 18-week countdown.  The clock may be paused, for example if the patient cannot make an appointment because of a work commitment; and patients may not attend appointments for other reasons.

What makes Barnet and Chase Farm different is its long IT-related experience, and the financial and technical support it has had from BT and the Department of Health under the National Programme for IT and later the London Programme for IT. Keeping track of patients requires the trust to be in full control of its IT systems.

Excessive secrecy

Several trusts implementing patient record systems within the NPfIT have had protracted problems keeping track of patients on their waiting lists – Barts and North Bristol for instance. The details are rarely made public – and the problems recur.

Barnet and Chase Farm has held its discussions on the 18-week problems in private, as has the Barnet CCG. This flies in the face of the coalition’s promise of a duty of candour when things go wrong; and if officials know they can keep their IT-related problems secret they can adopt risky implementations without accountability.

The high-risk implementations continue – at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, for example, where patients and the public have not been given the full story on what has gone wrong after the implementation  of an NPfIT patient record system.

When safety is at risk – which it can be when a trust loses track of patients on their systems – the NHS has a duty to explain. At least so there is a chance lessons will be learned.

NAO report – NHS waiting times for elective care in England.

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Posted in Campaign4Change

Are Govt IT-based project disasters over? Ask the Army

Posted on 16/01/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

When senior civil servants know an IT-based project is in trouble and they’re unsure how bad things are, they sometimes offer their minister an all-encompassing euphemism to publicly describe the status of the scheme – teething.

Which may be why the defence secretary Philip Hammond told the House of Commons in November 2013 that the IT project to support army recruiting was having “teething” problems.

Now Hammond knows more, he says the problems are “big”. He no longer uses the “t” word. Speaking about the £440m 10-year Recruitment Partnering Project in the House of Commons this week Hammond said:

“Yes, there are big problems with the IT and I have told the House on repeated occasions that we have IT challenges…”

Only a few days ago Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude suggested that Government IT was no longer a byword for disaster, though he accepted there were still challenges.

In a speech on how he expected the UK to become the G8’s most digital government by next year (whatever that means) Maude said: “… it’s great news that DVLA is about to launch online driving records which can be used by anyone with a driving licence as well as by the insurance industry.

“Back in 2010 our digital offering was limited at best and government IT was a by-word for disaster … There are still challenges but with the help of the Government Digital Service I am determined that the UK will be the G8’s most digital government by next year.”

A few days later The Times reported on a leaked Gartner report on the army Recruitment Partnering Project. The report expressed concerns about the entire plan, including a poor project management team and delays that were allowed to spiral out of control.

It claimed that the Army’s recruitment division had failed to challenge MoD policy in 2011 that had apparently favoured the less suitable of the two competing bidders chasing the contract.

Hammond is said to be mulling over a £50m payout for Capita to build a new infrastructure for the recruiting system instead of trying to integrate it with systems supplied by the “Atlas” consortium under the Defence Information Infrastructure project. Hammond told the House of Commons this week:

“… there have been initial difficulties with that recruiting process as we transition to the new recruiting arrangements with Capita.

“In particular, we have encountered difficulties with the IT systems supporting the application and enlistment process. The decision to use the legacy Atlas IT platform was deemed at the time to be the quickest and most cost-effective way of delivering the new recruitment programme.

“An option to revert to a Capita hosting solution was included in the contracts as a back-up solution.

“I was made aware in the summer of last year that the Army was encountering problems with the integration of the Capita system into the Atlas platform. Since then we have put in place a number of workarounds and mitigation measures for the old IT platform to simplify the application process, and we have reintroduced military personnel to provide manual intervention to support the process.

“Having visited the Army’s recruitment centre in Upavon [Wiltshire] on 30 October, it became clear to me that, despite the Army putting in place measures to mitigate those problems in the near term, further long-term action was needed to fix the situation.

“It was agreed in principle at that point that the Atlas system was not capable of timely delivery of the Capita-run programme and that we would need to take up the option of reverting to Capita building a new IT platform specifically to run its system, which will be ready early next year.

“… we have already taken action to bring in a range of new initiatives that will make it progressively easier and quicker for applicants … the introduction this month of a new front-end web application for Army recruitment; a simplified online application form; more streamlined medical clearance processes …

“With an improved Army recruitment website, streamlined medicals and an increase in the number of recruiting staff, recruits should see a much-improved experience by the end of this month.

“.. we are looking at further ways of improving the management of the recruiting process in the intervening period before the introduction of the advanced IT system now being developed in partnership with Capita, which is expected to be deployed in February 2015…”

Vernon Croaker, Labour’s defence spokesman, said the recruitment project was an IT fiasco. He wondered why Hammond had initially described the problems as teething.

“Today we have learned [from newspapers] that the problems are even worse than anyone thought and still have not been fixed.

“Will the Defence Secretary tell the House which Minister signed off the deal and who has been responsible for monitoring it?

“… Will the Secretary of State also confirm that £15.5m has been spent building the existing flawed computer system behind the project? Finally, is it correct that this continuing disaster is costing taxpayers £1 million every month?…”

Croaker quoted a minister Andrew Robathan as telling MPs on 10 April 2013 that the “Recruiting Partnering Project with Capita…will lead to a significant increase in recruiting performance”.

Croaker said: “Is there any Member of this House, any member of our armed forces or, indeed, any member of the British public who still believes that?”

In March 2012 Capita announced that the Recruitment Partnering Project was valued at about £44m a year for 10 years and was expected to deliver benefits in excess of £300m to the armed forces. It would “release military recruiters back to the front line” said Capita.

Comment. Francis Maude is probably right: there don’t seem to be as many big IT-based project failures as in previous decades. But then the truth isn’t known because progress reports on big IT-related schemes are not published.

Indeed little would be known about the Capita Recruitment Partnering Project is not for the leaked report to The Times. Without the leak, public information on the state of the project would be confined to Hammond’s “teething problems” comment to MPs last November.

Internal and external reports on the state of the Universal Credit IT project continue to be kept secret.  It’s not even clear whether ministers are properly briefed on their big IT projects. Hammond almost certainly wasn’t last year. IDS was left to commission his own “red team” review of Universal Credit IT.

Perhaps the “good news” reporting culture in Whitehall explains why the NHS IT scheme, the NPfIT, continued to die painfully slowly for 7 years before senior officials and ministers started to question whether all was well.

Hammond is still getting wrong information. He described “Atlas” systems in the House of Commons as the “legacy IT platform”.

The Atlas contract for the Defence Information Infrastructure was awarded in 2005 for 10 years. It doesn’t even expire until next year. It may be convenient for officials to suggest that the reason Capita has been unable to link new recruitment systems into the DII network is because DII is old – legacy IT.  But the multi-billion pound Atlas DII project cannot be accurately described as “legacy” yet.

If ministers don’t get the truth about their big IT projects until serous problems are so obvious they can no longer be denied, how can Parliament and taxpayers expect to get the truth?

Lessons from NASA?

NASA put in place processes, procedures and rules to ensure engineers were open and deliberately adversarial in challenging assumptions. Even so it has had difficulties getting engineers to express  their views freely.

Diane Vaughan in her excellent book “The Challenger Launch Decision” referred to large organisations that proceeded as if nothing was wrong “in the face of evidence that something was wrong”.  She said NASA made a series of seemingly harmless decisions that “incrementally moved the space agency towards a catastrophic outcome”.

After the loss of Challenger NASA made many changes. But an investigation into the subsequent tragedy of the Columbia space shuttle indicated that little had actually changed – even though few of the top people who had been exposed to the lessons of Challenger were still in position.

If NASA couldn’t change when lives depended on it, is it likely the UK civil service will ever change?  A political heavyweight,  Francis Maude has tried and failed to get departments to be more open about progress or otherwise on their big IT-based projects.  Permanent secretaries now allow the out-of-date “traffic light” status of some projects to be published in the annual report of the Major Projects Authority. That is not openness.

The failure so far of the Recruitment Partnering Project, the routine suppression of information on technology-based scheme such as this, and the circumscribed “good news” briefings to ministers, suggest that government IT-based project failures are here to stay, despite the best intentions of the Cabinet Office, GDS and the Major Projects Authority.

Thank you to campaigner Dave Orr for his email on the recruitment project

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Capita, change management, Defence, DWP, excessive secrecy, GDS, Government digital Service, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, MoD, npfit, openness and transparency, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Big 4 Universal Credit IT suppliers punished?

Posted on 09/01/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

The  latest draft business case for Universal Credit suggests existing IT suppliers will have little to do with the “end-state digital solution” that is  due eventually to support the roll-out of UC.

The Department for Work and Pensions will use a mixture of its own and external people for the end-state digital solution.

Computer Weekly quotes part of the draft business case as saying:

“To extend the current IT solution we will be using a standard waterfall delivery approach largely using existing suppliers and commercial frameworks, in order to de-risk delivery and ensure UC continues to have a safe and secure introduction.

“The end-state digital solution will be delivered using an agile, and therefore iterative, approach as advocated by the Cabinet Office with significantly less reliance on the large IT suppliers delivering the current UC IT service.”

Politicalscrapbook.net picks up Computer Weekly’s report and says that Iain Duncan Smith “punishes Universal Credit IT suppliers“. 

Costs

Computer Weekly quotes the draft business case as putting the cost of the end-state solution at £106m – comprising external IT costs of £69m and in-house “Design and Build” team costs of £37m.

The total cost of UC IT is now put at £535m – down substantially on the £673m estimate in the DWP’s December 2012 UC business case.

UC project at “red” 

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Francis Maude and his team at the government digital service have objected to the twin-track approach to UC but were outflanked by “a majority” of other government ministers and project advisers, leaked minutes say.

The twin-track approach to UC IT means that the DWP and its main suppliers – HP, Accenture, IBM and BT – continue to develop existing systems (a blend of legacy and new technology) while a separate team develops a new “end-state” system for use by the end of 2017. It’s unclear how the two systems will differ. 

Computer Weekly quotes the latest draft business case as saying it is “unclear what the digital service will deliver and to what timescales”.

Due to the multitude of problems facing universal credit, the project has been coded “red” overall, according to the Guardian.

Comment

Computer Weekly has done well to gain sight of the latest draft business case for UC.

Whoever wrote the draft appears to accept the Cabinet Office’s case for departments to “move away from large ICT projects” and thus “reduce waste, provide a more flexible approach to complex business requirements that are likely to change over time and reduce the risk of project failures”. (National Audit Office, Universal Credit: early progress). 

But is the DWP simply telling the Cabinet Office what it wants to hear?  All the signs are that the big money at the DWP will continue to go to its main IT suppliers. 

The £106m agile “end-state digital solution” is a bonus system which may or may not materialise.  It is in essence a big, agile research project and the DWP is having trouble finding IT professionals to work on it.

If ever it’s a success it could start to replace existing UC IT in 2017 or beyond. But that may never happen. The DWP has already spent more than £300m on existing UC technology and is set to spend a lot more: around £90m. The DWP is unlikely to scrap it.

So HP, IBM, Accenture and BT are all but guaranteed a large income stream from the non end-state UC technology.

Even without the UC project the big 4 are guaranteed a large income from the DWP’s other work which includes:

– Personal Independence Implementation – 2.8bn 2011–2016
– Fraud and error programme – £770m  2012–2015
– Child maintenance group change 1.2bn 2009–2014
– Pensions reform Enabling Retirement Savings programme 1.04bn 2007–2018
– State Pension reform – single tier £114m 2012–2017
– Specialist Disability Employment programme – £203m 2012–2014

The big 4 will also continue to receive a large chunk of the DWP’s IT budget for maintaining and upgrading the existing software, hardware and networks.

Business cases are written by experts in the writing of Whitehall business cases.  Their main purpose is to provide a case for the Treasury to release funds for a project. They give current thinking on costs and benefits. The documents are revised when these change significantly.

So the statement in the UC draft business case that the new end-state digital solution will rely “significantly less” on existing UC IT suppliers means little: it is subject to change.

And the words “significantly less” are  unexplained. They may have no scientific basis. 

Worrying

The big 4 suppliers continue to be all-important to the DWP – and are so enmeshed that they decide at times how much they should be paid, suggests the NAO.

From its latest report on the UC project, the NAO comments on the DWP’s lack of control of suppliers :

– “In February 2013, the Major Projects Authority reported there was no evidence of the Department actively managing its supplier contracts and recommended that the Department needed to urgently get a grip of its supplier management.”

– “[The DWP has] limited IT capability and ‘intelligent client’ function leading to a risk of supplier self-review.”

– “[The DWP has] inadequate controls over what would be supplied, when and at what cost because deliverables were not always defined before contracts were signed.”

– “[The DWP has an] over-reliance on performance information that was provided by suppliers without Department validation.”

– ” … the Department did not enforce all the key terms and conditions of its standard contract management framework, inhibiting its ability to hold suppliers to account.”

So it would be naively optimistic to suppose that if the big 4 were to be frozen out of the end-state solution for UC that it would make much difference to their income from the DWP.      

UC in chaos or not?

A generous interpretation of all the available evidence on the UC project so far is that the DWP is working through, and understanding, the difficulties on an immensely complicated IT-enabled project.

And supporters of the twin-track approach could argue that two completely independent sets of teams are working in parallel and in discreet competition to produce the most successful system. One team comprises the big 4 using waterfall and the other a largely in-house team using agile.  Eventually one system will prevail, even if it’s 2020 or beyond that it handles securely online all types of claims. On completion the system will simplify benefit claims and cut the costs of administration.

A less generous interpretation of the available facts is that the UC IT project  is in chaos and that vast sums continue to be poured into a poorly formed strategy that nobody in government will concede is failing;  all parties are preoccupied with resolving problems as they arise and expecting irrationally that things will come good in the end.  Nobody should expect the full truth to emerge from those who have a deep interest in the project’s success including IDS and his permanent secretary Robert Devereux.

Howard Shiplee, head of the UC project, may still be getting his head around how chaotic things are. The highly capable David Pitchford, who headed UC  for a few months before he quit the civil service last year, came close to saying the project was in chaos. His Major Projects Authority said in February 2013 that the DWP needed to “rethink the delivery approach”, said the NAO.

Indeed the UC project shows many of the usual signs of a government IT-based project failure:

– major changes in the basic assumptions between the business case of December 2012 and the latest draft business case
– excessive secrecy (keeping secret a succession of internal and external reports on the project).
– defensiveness (continued DWP claims that problems are historic)
– a high turnover of leaders
– a culture of good news that “limited open discussion and stifled challenge”, said the NAO
– a lack of control of suppliers (NAO)
– repeated delays
– suppliers that get paid regardless of whether their systems are contributing to a  successful project.

To me things look chaotic but I hope I’m wrong. I’d like UC IT to work. IDS and Shiplee will probably know the whole truth – and they are still in post, to date.  If Shiplee leaves the project before the general election that could be an indication of how bad things really are.   

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, HP, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, project management, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Top 5 posts on this site in last 12 months

Posted on 02/01/2014 | 1 comment

Below are the top 5 most viewed posts of 2013.  Of other posts the most viewed includes “What exactly is HMRC paying Capgemini billions for?” and “Somerset County Council settles IBM dispute – who wins?“.

1) Big IT suppliers and their Whitehall “hostages”

Mark Thompson is a senior lecturer in information systems at Cambridge Judge Business School, ICT futures advisor to the Cabinet Office and strategy director at consultancy Methods.

Last month he said in a Guardian comment that central government departments are “increasingly being held hostage by a handful of huge, often overseas, suppliers of customised all-or-nothing IT systems”.

Some senior officials are happy to be held captive.

“Unfortunately, hostage and hostage taker have become closely aligned in Stockholm-syndrome fashion.

“Many people in the public sector now design, procure, manage and evaluate these IT systems and ignore the exploitative nature of the relationship,” said Thompson.

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages bond with their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

This month the Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued  a pre-tender notice for Oracle ERP systems. Worth between £250m and £750m, the framework will be open to all central government departments, arms length bodies and agencies and will replace the current “Prism” contract with Capgemini.

It’s an old-style centralised framework that, says Chris Chant, former Executive Director at the Cabinet Office who was its head of G-Cloud, will have Oracle popping champagne corks.

2) Natwest/RBS – what went wrong?

Outsourcing to India and losing IBM mainframe skills in the process? The failure of CA-7 batch scheduling software which had a knock-on effect on multiple feeder systems?

As RBS continues to try and clear the backlog from last week’s crash during a software upgrade, many in the IT industry are asking how it could have happened.

3) Another Universal Credit leader stands down

Universal Credit’s Programme Director, Hilary Reynolds, has stood down after only four months in post. The Department for Work and Pensions says she has been replaced by the interim head of Universal Credit David Pitchford.

Last month the DWP said Pitchford was temporarily leading Universal Credit following the death of Philip Langsdale at Christmas. In November 2012 the DWP confirmed that the then Programme Director for UC, Malcolm Whitehouse, was stepping down – to be replaced by Hilary Reynolds. Steve Dover,  the DWP’s Corporate Director, Universal Credit Programme Business, has also been replaced.

4) The “best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet”?

Edward Donald, the chief executive of Reading-based Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, is reported in the trust’s latest published board papers as saying that a Cerner go-live has been relatively successful.

“The Chief Executive emphasised that, despite these challenges, the ‘go-live’ at the Trust had been more successful than in other Cerner Millennium sites.”

A similar, stronger message appeared was in a separate board paper which was released under FOI.  Royal Berkshire’s EPR [electronic patient record] Executive Governance Committee minutes said:

“… the Committee noted that the Trust’s launch had been considered to be the best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet and that despite staff misgivings, the project was progressing well. This positive message should also be disseminated…”

Royal Berkshire went live in June 2012 with an implementation of Cerner outside the NPfIT.  In mid-2009, the trust signed with University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre to deliver Millennium.

Not everything has gone well – which raises questions, if this was the best Cerner implementation yet,  of what others were like.

5) Universal Credit – the ace up Duncan Smith’s sleeve?

Some people, including those in the know, suspect  Universal Credit will be a failed IT-based project, among them Francis Maude. As Cabinet Office minister Maude is ultimately responsible for the Major Projects Authority which has the job, among other things, of averting major project failures.

But Iain Duncan Smith, the DWP secretary of state, has an ace up his sleeve: the initial go-live of Universal Credit is so limited in scope that claims could be managed by hand, at least in part.

The DWP’s FAQs suggest that Universal Credit will handle, in its first phase due to start in October 2013, only new claims  – and only those from the unemployed.  Under such a light load the system is unlikely to fail, as any particularly complicated claims could managed clerically.

 

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, Cerner, Cloud, Cloud Computing, CSC, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, G-Cloud, Government IT, health records, HP, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, LPfIT, Major Projects Authority, NHS, npfit, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, Real-Time Information, SAP, Universal Credit

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Is £40m write-off on a big software project normal?

Posted on 17/12/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

On BBC R4’s “Week in Westminster” on Saturday morning (14/12/13)  guest presenter Isabel Hardman of The Spectator spoke to Conservative MP Richard Bacon and me about big government projects that go wrong.

Hardman mentioned that Bacon has co-written a book  on government failures Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it.

Referring to write-offs so far of about £40m on Universal Credit, Hardman asked me whether it was normal for such a write-off on a big project.

I said it wasn’t. The work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has said it was. When questioned by MPs of the work and pensions committee on 9 December, IDS implied that it was not unusual to write-off a third on large software-based projects. He suggested that research by Forrester supported this view.

Software coding for Universal Credit has cost about £120m so far (excluding hardware, infrastructure, consultancy or other IT-related costs). So IDS suggested that a write off of £40m was only about a third of the software coding costs.

But I haven’t seen any evidence that suggests write-offs of a third of the software costs on a big project are typical.   

I replied to Hardman that although there has been much trial and error on Universal Credit IT, £40m is a lot to write off.

[Trial and error included an attempt, from 2011 onwards, to adopt an agile approach but the National Audit Office said the DWP “experienced problems incorporating the agile approach into existing contracts, governance and assurance structures”. The NAO added that the Cabinet Office “did not consider that the Department (DWP) had at any point prior to the reset [Feb-May 2013]  appropriately adopted an agile approach to managing the Universal Credit programme”. The DWP has now introduced what it calls Agile 2.0, a hybrid approach incorporating elements of  agile with waterfall, though agile purists say it is impossible to combine the two.]

I told Hardman that the write-offs were largely because the DWP was unclear at the outset what the software was supposed to do.”With big IT projects it’s a bit like designing a bridge and you know where one side begins but you’re not sure where the other side ends. They have been learning as they go along and that’s probably why there have been large write-offs,” I said.

Hardman asked Richard Bacon whether it was normal to set out on these big projects without knowing where the bridge was going. Bacon agreed, citing the NPfIT which had led to large write-offs on failed work for England-wide electronic patient records. He said it was not at all abnormal for ministers to set off on big projects without knowing where they were going.  

The good news?

I told Hardman that IDS was at least well informed. He now has the NAO scrutinising the project as well as his own external consultants and the independently-minded Howard Shiplee as head of the project.

But I didn’t think UC would be complete until 2020 at the earliest given that the last big computerisation of benefit systems, Operational Strategy, took about 10 years to complete. Hardman said: “That would be a humiliation for IDS surely?”

I replied that IDS may not even be in politics in 2017. I also said that UC will probably not bring the financial benefits predicted, to judge from the last big computerisation of benefits.  But UC has wide support. Perhaps, I said, it has to work … eventually. 

BBC R4 Week in Westminster – 14/12/13

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, DWP, Government IT, health records, HP, IBM, Major Projects Authority, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

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Birmingham council to shrink enigmatic deal with Capita

Posted on 13/12/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Birmingham City Council’s IT services company Service Birmingham may take a hit in an £87m package of cuts, according to the Birmingham Post.

Council leader Sir Albert Bore is quoted as saying

“We have worked hard to reduce back office costs, including my target of saving £20m per year from our Service Birmingham contract.”

Critics are calling for further reductions throughout the full range of contracts with Service Birmingham – including those covering the council’s call centre, the council tax collection service, various ‘one-off’ projects and services to schools.

The costs of the contract are controversial and unclear. The Birmingham Post says that the “problem for those outside the council executive is that the terms and scale of the contract are hidden, meaning figures only come to the fore once accounts are published at a later date.”

Last month a revelation that the new library’s website cost £1.2m to set up brought complaints from small IT companies and specialists that they could have delivered it at a fraction of the cost.

The council’s leaders are under pressure from backbenchers to cut costs from this contract, before closing libraries and cutting park provision.

There have been calls to cancel the contract, but leaders say the council lacks the expertise to take over IT and call centre services

Professor David Bailey from the Aston Business School, a long standing critic of the Service Birmingham deal, said leading councillors were fudging details of the contract to make it look like a £20m cut from a £50m contract when it is from a £120m deal.

He called for the contracts to be published online to clear up the costs and exactly what is covered.

He said: “You can’t have an open and frank conversation with the taxpaying citizens of Birmingham about the future finances of the city if you aren’t actually open over key facts like the real overall cost of Capita Service Birmingham.

“Simply publish the Capita Service Birmingham Contract in full so everyone can make their own mind up about it before commenting on the rest of the City Council’s budget proposals. Barnet has done it. Why can’t Birmingham?”

Thank you to openness campaigner Dave Orr for drawing my attention to the Birmingham Post articles.

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Posted in Campaign4Change