DWP starts media campaign on Universal Credit IT tomorrow

Posted on 19/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has told MPs his department is launching a “major exercise” tomorrow to inform the media about Universal Credit, including progress with the IT project.

The public relations push will include a demonstration to journalists of the Univeral Credit front-end, and an explanation of the ability of “agile” to rectify problems as you go along. Duncan Smith said there is a lot of ignorance in the media, and suppositions, that need tackling head on.

His full statement on the PR campaign is at the foot of this article.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith’s remarks to MPs sound remarkably like the statements that were made in the early part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, when DH ministers and senior officials were anxious to correct ignorance and suppositions in the media – and to show journalists the front end of new electronic patient record systems.

Several times journalists were invited to Richmond house in Whitehall, the HQ of the DH, to hear how well the NPfIT was going. So anxious were the minister and leading officials to give a good impression of the programme that, on one occasion, trade journalists who had an insight into the NPfIT’s progress and could ask some awkward questions in front of the general media were barred from attending.

I would like Universal Credit to succeed. In concept it simplifies the excessively complex and costly benefit system. The worrying thing about the scheme, apart from the DWP’s overly sensitive reactions to scepticism in the media, is the way UC seems to be following the path which led to NPfIT’s downfall.

The Secretary of State attacks the media while trying to show UC in a glowing light and at the same time keeps secret all the DWP’s interview reviews and reports on actual progress. Duncan Smith says that the DWP wants to be open on UC but his department is turning down FOI requests.

There is no doubt that Duncan Smith has a conviction that the programme is on course, on budget, and will deliver successfully. But there still a morass of uncertainty for the DWP to contend with, and lessons to be learnt from pilots, some of which could be important enough to require a fundamental re-think. That’s to say nothing of HMRC’s Real-Time Information project which is part of UC.

Duncan Smith says the UC project is not due to be complete until 2017 which gives the DWP ample time to get it right. But ministers and officials in the last administration gave the NPfIT 10 years to complete; and today, nine years later, the scheme is being officially dismantled.

Did NPfIT ministers really know or understand the extent of the project’s true complexities and uncertainties?  Did they fully grasp the limited ability of suppliers to deliver, or the willingness of the NHS to change?  But they were impressed with the patient record front-end system and they organised several Parliamentary events to demonstrate it to MPs.

The NPfIT public relations exercises – which included DH-sponsored DVDs and a board game to market the NPfIT – were all in the end pointless.

Should Duncan Smith be running Universal Credit?

This is another concern. Duncan Smith is much respected and admired in Parliament but he appears too close to UC to be an objective leader. At a hearing of the Work and Pensions this week Duncan Smith took mild criticism of UC as if it were a verbal attack on his child.

It is doubtful anyone working for Duncan Smith would dare give him bad news on UC , though he attends lots of departmental meetings. Doubtless he listens to all those who agree with him, those who are walking press releases on the progress of the UC programme. He’d be a good marketing/PR man on UC. But surely not its leader. Not the one making the most important decisions. For that you would need somebody who’s free from the politics, who is independently minded, and who welcomes informed criticism.

Is there any point in a demo of front-end systems?

Seeing a front-end system means little or nothing. The question is will it work in practice when it is scaled up, when exceptions come to light, and when large numbers of people try to contact the helpdesks because they cannot get to grips with the technology and the interfaces,  or have particular difficulties with their claim.

What will a media campaign achieve?

If the NPfIT experiences are anything to go by, journalists who criticise the UC project will be made to feel stupid or uninformed.

In a totalitarian regime the media could be forced to publish what the government wants people to believe. Will the DWP’s PR campaign be designed to achieve the same end without the slightest attempt at coercion?

Duncan Smith’s comments to MPs

Below is some of what Iain Duncan Smith told Work and Pensions Committee MPs this week. He had been asked by a Committee MP to have a dialogue with the media to ensure that people believe that Universal Credit is a good thing.

Duncan Smith:

“On Thursday we are carrying out a major exercise in informing the median about what we are doing, looking at the system front-end, about budgets and all the elements the committee has been inquiring into.

“We will take them through that, show them that. We are going to open up much more. It is such an important system that I want people to learn what it is all about.  There is a lot of ignorance in the media and suppositions made; things that are important to tackle head on. Everyone says you mustn’t have a big bang; you are not going to be ready in time. The time we deliver this is 2017 when it is complete.  That is over four years…”

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, change management, culture, DWP, e-health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Government IT, IT projects, managing change, managing outsourced services, NHS, npfit, Politics, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Government Digital Service sets an example on cloud

Posted on 18/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Government Digital Service is putting its money where its mouth is. A leading public sector advocate of the cloud, GDS says that the first cloud hosting provider it is working with is Skyscape.

Mark O’Neill, Head of Service Delivery and Innovation at GDS, which is a team of innovators based at the Cabinet Office, writes that GDS is building GOV.UK, currently in beta at http://www.gov.uk.

“In the past, we might have looked at dedicated servers or possibly even our own rack in a datacentre somewhere. We would then have had to decide if we wanted to own the servers or if we should rent them some time to break out amortisation tables and spreadsheets.

“We would have to make sure that we were not locked in if we needed to move servers, so it would be necessary to negotiate break clauses in contracts; we would need to arrange access to server rooms for security accreditation; we would need to… well, the list goes on and on.

“The cloud has transformed all of this. Through the G-Cloud framework we are able to simply and rapidly buy highly reliable, highly cost-effective hosting services.

“Colleagues in GDS put together a statement of our requirements based on the experience we had gained during the alpha and the ongoing beta releases of GOV.UK and experience from the delivery of other major online services, both public and private sector.

“We then tested that statement of requirements against the list of suppliers on the G-Cloud framework. This allowed us to sift the number of potential providers down to four who met the statement of requirements.

“We then invited each of the suppliers in and used a consistent set of questions to explore their ability to meet our needs, their approach to operational service delivery and how they could provide flexible, scalable services through the cloud.

“To meet the needs of GOV.UK, we are planning to work with a number of different Infrastructure as a Service providers. We are happy to announce that the first cloud hosting provider we are working with is Skyscape.

“We have used G-Cloud previously for a number of small projects covering services like hosting and operations. We were very happy to discover that letting a major service contract for our flagship platform, GOV.UK, was equally straightforward and quick.

“Whilst the GOV.UK contract is the largest we have let so far, it is one of an increasing number we are letting through G-Cloud, which is now our standard way of procuring infrastructure services… If you have not used G-Cloud before then take a look, you will be pleasantly surprised. In the words of a song of my youth, ‘It was easy. It was cheap. Go and do it!'”

Introducing a new supplier – Skyscape

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cloud, cost reduction, efficiency savings, Government IT, IT projects, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, public sector, public services, reducing cost strategically

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A “best friend” of Francis Maude joins Cabinet Office as COO

Posted on 18/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Troubleshooting Stephen Kelly, a “best friend” of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, is taking over as Chief Operating Officer of Government at the Cabinet Office. He also has Ian Watmore’s old job of head of the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group.

A profile of Kelly in the Daily Telegraph last year suggested he was a caricature of someone who was most likely to annoy civil servants. The Telegraph’s Louise Armitstead said Kelly had

“Longish hair, combed back with ‘product’, loud tie, edgy suit, transatlantic drawl – and the enthusiasm of an untrained golden retriever.”

He has a reputation for cheerfully taking on toxic projects and making them work. He has been in charge of the Coalition’s plan to mutualise parts of the public sector.

He was chief executive of Micro Focus, a small UK software company that he helped to turn around.

The Cabinet Office says Kelly will “enable the Government to go even further with its crucial efficiency and reform agenda and build on the £5.5bn of efficiency savings achieved last year”.

He led the successful delivery of MyCSP – the first ‘John Lewis-style’ mutual to spin out from central government. It administers pensions for the 1.5 million Civil Service Scheme members.

Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, Richard Heaton, said, “Stephen is one of the most successful CEOs from the private sector and has already proven himself within Government.”

Maude said, “I’ve always said Government needs to function more like the best run businesses and this new appointment, which will strengthen the corporate centre at the heart of Whitehall, is another step towards meeting that goal.

“… We want to go much further in cutting waste, saving money and streamlining Whitehall.  Stephen brings expertise and charisma to this crucial role and I look forward to working with him…”

Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, said Kelly will help to pioneer change in the public sector, “building on the significant progress already made in making Whitehall more efficient and helping to put Britain’s public finances back on track”.

The appointment was made following an external competition.

Comment

A good appointment but the best don’t stay long.

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Probation officers are denied handhelds despite big national IT contracts

Posted on 18/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The  Ministry of Justice has been struggling with national IT contracts and suppliers for years.  Are things much better today?  

In 2009 the National Audit Office reported on a project that MP Richard Bacon said was a “checklist of what not to do in a government IT project”.

He was referring to the failure of the National Offender Management Information System – Nomis.

The Home Office launched the project – originally called C-Nomis – in 2004. The aim was to provide a single database of offenders to replace a range of legacy systems.

When the Ministry of Justice was formed in 2007, it took over the project from the Home Office and found that projected costs had risen from £234m to £690m.

The MoJ simplified the plan which was to link various systems on offenders, rather than have the data stored in one place.

Today the National Audit Office has published “Restructuring of the National Offender Management Service” which discloses that suppliers are still struggling with Nomis systems. Indeed the MoJ’s IT suppliers have come up with plans that civil servants found unrealistic, according to today’s NAO report.

The National Offender Management Service is an agency of the Ministry of Justice. It manages 117 public prisons,  the contracts for 14 private prisons, and 43,000 staff in prisons. It commissions and funds services from 35 probation trusts, which in turn oversee 235,000 offenders released into the community.

Says the NAO in today’s report:

“The Agency [National Offender Management Service] estimates the additional costs necessary to resolve defects in legacy information and communications technology projects will be in the region of £12m to £35m in 2012-13.

“In the summer of 2011, the Agency learnt that two of its suppliers were experiencing significant difficulties in meeting agreed delivery dates.

“Both a national case management platform for probation and a national offender risk assessment system, shared between prisons and probation, were in difficulty.

“The suppliers had not understood the complexity of the project requirements when they committed to fixed price contracts, and underestimated the difficulties of migrating data from legacy systems.

“Upon review, the Agency found that suppliers’ plans to resolve these issues were unrealistic.

“The Agency invited the Major Projects Authority to conduct a series of reviews in 2012 on probation information and communications technology projects. A review in April 2012 recognised the Agency’s positive progress throughout the year.

“However, the projects remained high risk and would continue to require a high degree of scrutiny. Problems persist in resolving the projects’ data migration and management information issues.

“These projects are part of the Agency’s National Offender Management Information System, which the NAO previously examined in a value-for-money report in 2009.”

The agency wants to cut IT costs as part of general efficiency savings. But the NAO report says that IT spending is going up. ICT and procurement costs in 2013/14 are projected to be £15m – and £24m the following year.

Probation officers tied to MoJ IT contracts

Probation officers find the MoJ’s IT particularly grim. The NAO found that probation trusts, although semi-autonomous, are tied to the MoJ’s national IT contracts, from which there is no escape.

 Says the NAO:

“… Most of the work of a probation officer is done out in the community, but probation officers must return to their offices to complete paperwork because of Information and Communications Technology restrictions, which trusts regard as an inefficient use of time…

“Probation officers are unable to use handheld devices to allow home working and lower travel costs.”

Comment:

When it was formed the MoJ was handed a chaotic concoction of IT  from the Home Office in 2007. Things seem to be little improved, judging by NAO reports.

That probation officers who spend most of their time in the community have to go back to the office to do their paperwork because of restrictive national IT contracts is  madness.

It is also odd that the MoJ asked the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority to look, earlier this year, at probation service IT.

What about prison service IT, which is where most of the MoJ’s IT budget goes? Do departments pick and choose what projects they want investigated by the Major Projects Authority?

Anyone who says that central government IT works in the main and should not be tampered with should look at the Ministry of Justice’s IT and its national IT contracts.

Indeed there is still so much wrong with central government IT. Why is change happening so slowly?

NAO – Restructuring of the National Offender Management Service.

Report on C-Nomis – NAO website

Known mistakes repeated on £234m IT system for prisons

Why big government IT projects keep failing – public accounts MP

Failed £234m C-Nomis IT project – ministers not told the full truth

Offender IT is a spectacular failure  

C-Nomis a masterclass in sloppy project management

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HMRC – you can change the people not the culture.

Posted on 17/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Years ago HMRC embraced openness by publishing minutes of its executive committee meetings.

Members of the monthly meetings of the HMRC “ExCom” [executive committee] include Lin Homer, the Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary, and CIO Phil Pavitt.  ExCom is the decision-making executive of HMRC.

The problem is that Excom minutes have been almost creatively uninformative. This is despite the cost to taxpayers of an ExCom meetings secretariat which provides support to the committee, co-ordinates papers and attends to take minutes.

Over the years the Excom members have changed of course, but the minutes from the start have parodied open government.

In its reporting what is said at Excom meetings, HMRC, it would appear, has rules based on a variation of BBC’s “Just a Minute”.  The title of the discussion can be mentioned as often as participants like but it’s against the rules to mention what HMRC does or decides.

In June Excom members discussed progress on RTI, HMRC’s highest-profile project, Real-Time Information, which is an essential part of Universal Credit.  This was recorded in the minutes under the heading RTI Overview … “The Committee went on to consider a range of elements…”  The minutes made no mention of any element.

This would be the ideal entry in HMRC Excom minutes:

6.2 Staff Survey

Excom members discussed the Staff Survey. The chairman and some members made remarks on the results. The discussion was wide-ranging and informative.  It included matters relating to risk and opportunities.  The results of the Staff Survey having been summarised, conclusions were reached, particularly on matters relating to HMRC, and proposals made for recommendations. A number of recommendations were agreed, some of which would be actioned shortly. Without any further discussion, and by a tacit mutual consent, members moved to the next item on the agenda.

Actual extracts from latest Excom minutes

Below are the first four items, taken from the latest Excomm minutes (the latest being 26 June 2012). I haven’t made these up.

If anyone reading these minutes is any the wiser about HMRC’s operations, and what recommendations have been agreed, please contact the department and let them know that a convention has been breached.

 Executive Committee summary minutes of meeting held on 26 June 2012

 Members:

Simon Bowles (Chair), Lin Homer, Dave Hartnett, Mike Falvey, Mike Eland, Stephen Banyard, Jim Harra, Phil Pavitt, Paul Gerrard (deputising for Craig Pemberton), Anthony Inglese.

 Attending:

Carol Bristow, Richard James, Stephen Hardwick, Will Cavendish (Cabinet Office Implementation Unit), Vicky Ranson (for item 2), Will Meehan (for item 3), Marie-Claire Uhart (for item 5), Janet Alexander (for item 6), John Atkinson (Secretariat).

Apologies: Craig Pemberton

1. Welcome

1.1 Simon Bowles opened the meeting and confirmed that Mike Falvey would be responsible for the meeting review and Stephen Hardwick would be responsible for drafting the key messages. He welcomed Paul Gerrard, who was deputising for Craig Pemberton. He also welcomed Will Cavendish, who was observing the meeting in the hub.

1.2 The minutes of the May 2012 meeting were agreed.

2. Risks to revenue raised

2.1 The Committee received a presentation on work aimed at increasing understanding of our 2011-12 performance and identifying the risks to the sustainability of this level of performance for the remainder of the SR period. They agreed to commission further work and to review the outcomes of this at their September 2012 meeting.

3. Performance hub

3.1 Following an overview of performance by the CFO, the relevant Directors General led a discussion around the hub visualisations on the following key aspects of current  performance – revenue raised, debt, tax credit error and fraud, contact centre performance, attendance management and employee engagement.

3.2 The Committee also discussed current causes for concern and risks related to departmental performance.

4. Causes for Celebration

4.1 The Committee reviewed the Causes for Celebration contained in the performance report.

My comment:

It’s a pity the Excom minutes are so defensive, even obfuscatory;  and it’s almost certainly because of HMRC’s culture and not the wish of members. Phil Pavitt is by any standard open and straightforward. He would probably change HMRC’s culture if he could. But could anybody?

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing (Ralph Emerson). Clearly HMRC is in the business of astonishing nobody.

Self-congratulatory

There is something revealing in the minutes, however. Now and again detail infiltrates them – and it is self-congratulatory.

“The Committee reviewed the Causes for Celebration contained in the performance report.”

And on Real-Time Information …

“Stephen Banyard [An HMRC  Director General] opened the session by giving a summary of progress to date in this area and the positive feedback received from customers, rep bodies and trade press.”

So while HMRC is facing significant levels of fraud and error – the National Audit Office has qualified HMRC’s accounts for the last  12 years – the Excom board appears to be in search of every opportunity to slap itself on the back.

The Excom minutes at least have a dream-like quality to them.  Perhaps, like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the Excom Board members will overcome all the challenges and monsters and eventually reach the Celestial City. They may then wake up. Maybe.

Excom (and a link to its minutes).

Excom’s June 2012 minutes

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Government IT, HMRC, openness and transparency, operational issues, public sector, Universal Credit

Would e-prescription system have saved this patient?

Posted on 14/09/2012 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

The Portsmouth News reported yesterday that 77 year-old Joan Dixon died on Ashling ward at St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester after a large overdose of heart medication.

Had the proposed dose of medication gone through an e-prescription system would it have sounded an alarm before such an inappropriately large individual dose could be administered?

The Portsmouth News reported that a week-long inquest heard how junior doctor Prashen Pillay prescribed Joan Dixon with Digoxin for an irregular heartbeat.

Dr Pillay had meant to prescribe 250 micrograms of the heart-slowing drug, but instead wrote mg for milligrams.

Dr Pillay, who had been working at the hospital for about eight weeks, said: ‘Somewhere between my brain and my right hand it got turned from micrograms into milligrams.’

Woman died after prescription mistake.

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Posted in health, NHS

Fujitsu on blacklist? Cabinet Office issues statement

Posted on 14/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

The Cabinet Office has denied it is operating a blacklist of poorly-performing suppliers – but says that suppliers deemed high risk may find it “more difficult to secure new work with HMG”.

In its statements to Kable’s Government Computing, the Cabinet Office also made it clear that suppliers deemed high risk can redeem themselves.

“Mechanisms exist to remove suppliers from the High Risk classification when performance improves dramatically.”

This suggests that Fujitsu would no longer be deemed high risk if it settled its dispute with the government over the NPfIT. Fujitsu has been seeking £700m after the failure of its NPfIT contract. A settlement has proved elusive and the case may go to court.

The FT said on Tuesday that Fujitsu has “in essence” been blacklisted. Neither Fujitsu nor the Cabinet Office are denying that Fujitsu has been put in the high-risk classification.

A Cabinet Office spokesman told Government Computing:

“We cannot comment on the status of individual suppliers, but we are absolutely clear that this Government will not tolerate poor supplier performance.

“We want to strengthen our contract management by reporting on suppliers’ performance against criteria and sharing the information across Government. This means that information on a supplier’s performance will be available and taken into consideration at the start of and during the procurement process (pre-contract). Suppliers with poor performance may therefore find it more difficult to secure new work with HMG.

“This policy will include the identification of any high-risk suppliers so that performance issues are properly taken into account before any new contracts are given.

“High-risk classification is based on material performance concerns. Suppliers deemed high risk will be subject to particularly close scrutiny when awarding new work.

“Overall, this is simply good commercial practice and in line with how we are improving the way government does business and emulating the best of the private sector.”

The spokesman said that contract extensions are within scope of the poor-performance policy but will be tackled in a proportional way – depending on the overall cost of the contract, the relative cost of extending it, and how critical the extension is.

The high-risk classification “applies to strategic suppliers who do business across Government, and is not limited to any specific sector”. Frameworks are also included.

“Our performance policy will apply to central government departments, where we have direct control of spending,” said the spokesman. But it is still unclear what direct control the Cabinet Office has of departmental spending.

That said, the Cabinet Office announced in June spending controls on central government that “allow government to act strategically in a way it never could before”. It added that there were “strict controls on ICT expenditure”.

That means that large ICT contracts to be awarded by departments must go to the Cabinet Office for approval; and the Cabinet Office has introduced a single point of contact for major suppliers, which means that the performance of strategic suppliers will be viewed in the round.

In the past suppliers have been able to tell departments that were about to award contracts that rumours of alleged poor performance in other departments were incorrect.

Comment

While not a blacklist the high-risk classification seems a good idea. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, is sending a message to suppliers that if they take legal action against a department it could stop them getting business across Whitehall.

But he’s also saying in effect: settle and we’ll remove you from the high-risk list.

Is there a danger that the power could swing too much in the government’s favour, allowing departments to poorly manage contracts with impunity? Probably not. Suppliers will have to take the high-risk list into account when signing deals.

They know that, in the insurance industry for example, if they mess up one contract word will soon get around.

Poorly-performing suppliers risk being frozen out of Government business – Government Computing

Fujitsu banned from goovernment contracts?

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Posted in Campaign4Change, cost reduction, Fujitsu, Government IT, innovation, legal disputes, Major Projects Authority, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, supplier relationships

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Suffocating secrecy culture in public life – ex-DPP

Posted on 13/09/2012 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office have made a little progress towards open government but it’s put into perspective by the fact that no progress reports are published on any of the government’s biggest IT projects including Universal Credit.

This morning on the BBC R4 Today programme Lord MacDonald, a Liberal Democrat peer and former Director of Public Prosecutions (2003-2008) – he was also head of the Crown Prosecution Service – spoke of the continuing culture of secrecy in British public life, which he called “absolutely suffocating”.

He was speaking about the wider implications of the Hillsborough Panel report yesterday. He said

 “I was in Whitehall for five years. The culture of secrecy in British political and public life is absolutely suffocating… The [Labour] Government brought in the Freedom of Information Act and that has made some difference but it’s not without interest that the prime minister at the time Mr Blair now describes that as one of his biggest mistakes.

“There still is a great attraction to the idea that only some people need to know about what is going on and others don’t… we have got to get away from this culture which is terribly old-fashioned and cannot co-exist with public confidence.”

He said that one of the lessons from Hillsborough was the inability of the state to be truthful about what had gone wrong.

“We have a tendency on the part of British public authorities to see themselves as apart from the public – a long-standing disease of secrecy in our public life and inadequate coroner’s system and a very deep and long-standing corruption in our police services – I don’t mean taking money – but in terms of a culture of deceit particularly when under attack; a culture of deceit that has been quite breathtaking in this case…”

Comment:

That culture of suffocating, almost tribal secrecy and deceit when things go wrong, flows from the trivial such as IT-based disasters to one of the most serious failures one can imagine – deaths caused at least in part by state incompetence.  What is to be done about that culture?

Lord MacDonald on BBC’s Today programme – 13 September 2012

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Posted in Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Gateway reviews

Universal Credit – a chance to do things differently.

Posted on 13/09/2012 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Comment

In his comment on the article “Is Univeral Credit really on track – the DWP hides the facts”  Nik Silver asks in essence: why shouldn’t progress reports by IBM and McKinsey on Universal Credit be kept between the parties and not made public?

He says that criticism is usually helpful if the two parties can speak frankly without external interference.

It’s a reasonable point – if you are judging the public sector by the private sector’s standards. A private company would not make public consultancy reports it has commissioned on the progress or otherwise of a particularly costly project. Why should it?

Private v public sector approaches on big projects

But if the project goes wrong the private sector board will be accountable for the loss of money, or opportunity, or both. A private company’s board cares about a failed project because it cares about the bottom line.  If there is cogent criticism in a consultancy report, it will ignore that criticism at its peril.

Those standards don’t always apply in the public sector. There is no bottom line to worry about, no individual responsibility. What matters is reputation. We have seen too many public sector failed projects where the desire to maintain face, politically and internally, distorts the truth on projects.

Several ministers were proclaiming the £11bn NHS IT plan, the NPfIT, to be a success while it was going disastrously wrong. On the Rural Payment Agency’s IT-based Single Payment Scheme Parliament discovered that bad news was covered up. Ministers Lord Bach and Lord Whitty said they were misled by their officials.

When the truth financially came out it was too late to turn around the project cheaply and easily. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee said that if such a failure had happened at a major plc, the board would have faced dismissal.

Cover up when a project goes wrong also happens in the private sector. But case studies indicate that when a private sector board finds out it has been lied to, it does its utmost to put things right. The bottom line is the motivation.

In the public sector it sometimes happens that nothing is done to put serious problems right because there is no acceptance there are any serious problems. Nobody is allowed to accept internally that things are going wrong. A state of unreality exists. Some know the project is doomed.  Some at the top think it’s on track. The truth in the consultancy reports remains hidden, even internally. [The DWP couldn’t find the IBM and McKinsey reports when we first asked for them.]

Like Nik Silver, we would like Universal Credit to succeed. We are not sure it will, because the truth is not coming out. Unless serious problems are admitted they cannot be tackled.

Public sector

In the public sector a disaster does not usually become apparent until things are so bad the seriousness of the problems cannot be denied. It may be that Universal Credit will be a success if it is delayed or changed substantially in scope. That won’t be possible without reports such as IBM’s and McKinsey’s being published.  In the meantime Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will  continue to be given papers showing that all is well.  If the IBM and McKinsey reports are published now, and they contain some serious high-level criticisms, perhaps impinging on policy and excessive complexity, the ills may be cured or at least tackled. If these and other progress reports are made public now the corrigible criticisms could create a political climate to address those ills.

At present Universal Credit looks like so many IT-based change programmes of the past.  One side says the project is becoming a disaster and the other side says all is well.  The truth I am sure is that some things look good and some things bad. The bad probably won’t be addressed unless Parliament, together with all those who have a professional interest in the project – and the public – know about it.

The way of the past is to keep everything hushed up until it’s too late. Now there’s a chance to do things differently.

Is Universal Credit really on track? – The DWP hides the facts.

Nik Silver’s website

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Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, Government IT, IBM, IT projects, npfit, openness and transparency, operational issues, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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Was Police National Computer misused to impugn reputations of Hillsborough dead?

Posted on 12/09/2012 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Today’s Independent Panel report into the Hillsborough tragedy says that the Police National Computer was accessed – possibly unlawfully –  to collect information on some of the 96 men, women and children who died because of events on 15 April 1989.

The report says that a  solicitor involved in the Hillsborough inquests disclosed a document to the Panel showing that criminal record checks were conducted selectively on some of the deceased who had recorded blood alcohol levels.

To protect the privacy of the deceased the Panel decided not to make public the document. Instead it described the process through which an attempt was made to establish links between blood alcohol levels and previous criminal convictions.

The Panel’s report says the document indicates that a Police National Computer (PNC) check was conducted on all who died at Hillsborough for whom a blood alcohol reading above zero was recorded. Says the Panel’s report:

“It [the document] includes a handwritten list of the names, dates of birth, blood alcohol readings and home addresses of 51 of the deceased and provides screen-prints apparently drawn from the PNC.

“A summary of the results appears on the front page, establishing the number ‘with cons’ (convictions)…

“There is no record of who conducted the checks or precisely when the checks occurred. The National Policing Improvement Agency, the organisation responsible for the PNC, confirmed to the Panel that information has not been retained within the PNC.

“It is the Panel’s view that criminal record checks were carried out on those of the deceased with recorded blood alcohol levels in an attempt to impugn personal reputations.

“There is, however, no evidence to suggest that this inappropriate – and possibly unlawful – exercise was used in the investigations, inquiries or inquests.”

Hillsborough report

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