Tag Archives: Efficiency and Reform Group

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 The Department for Work and Pensions says she has been replaced by the interim head of Universal Credit David Pitchford.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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Will truth ever be told when things go wrong?

Posted on 28/11/2013 | 5 comments

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has criticised civil servants who don’t always tell ministers what is going on in their departments. He used the Universal Credit project as an example.

He told the Financial Times: “There were a lot of failures in DWP and it isn’t good that it took a review commissioned . . . by the secretary of state to disclose what was going on.”

He added:

“You’ll find a lot of ministers don’t know a lot of things going on in the department because there’s no way you’ll find out.”

Maude’s comments touch on a common factor in IT-related project disasters in government – that ministers get mostly “good news” from their officials, and learn little or nothing about the seriousness of problems until a debacle is only too apparent to be denied.

But can ministers or the boards of large private companies ever expect their senior staff to be the bearers of bad news?

The Performing Right Society did not find out the truth about its failing IT-based project until it appointed a new head of IT who had no emotional equity in what had gone on before. [Crash – chapter 1)

The National Audit Office report “Universal Credit: early progress” referred to a “good news” culture at the Department for Work and Pensions that “limited open discussion of risks and stifled challenge”.

Ministers in charge of the Rural Payments Agency’s Single Payment Scheme said they were kept in the dark about the seriousness of IT-related problems. “When delays occurred, many stakeholders only found out at the last minute,” said a report of the Public Accounts Committee.

“Conspiracy of optimism”

The PAC report of March 2007 is worth a further mention:

“Lord Bach [minister in charge of the Single Payment Scheme] told us that he felt very let down by the advice he had received from the RPA [Rural Payments Agency], upon whom he said the Department relied very heavily in these circumstances, and the “conspiracy of optimism” on the part of the Agency.”

Lord Bach told MPs that he kept being told by officials that all was well.

“I frankly have to say that I do not think that that was satisfactory from senior civil servants whose job is to tell ministers the truth.”

Let down by civil servants – Universal Credit

Now the FT reports that Francis Maude has “entered the controversy over the implementation of the government’s universal credit scheme”. Maude told the FT he believed that Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, had been let down by his civil servants.

Maude said senior civil servants in charge of projects should tell ministers bluntly if they felt they were being misdirected and insist on a formal “letter of direction” to show that they had raised their objections. If they did not, they should be accountable for failings on their watch.

Maude did not comment directly on whether Robert Devereux, the top official in Mr Duncan Smith’s department, should take the rap for the much-criticised implementation of universal credit, but said: “I think everybody has to take responsibility for what they were part of”.

SROs accountable to MPs?

He suggested that civil servants who are in charge of big projects, known as senior responsible owners (SROs), should account directly to parliament, which would “toughen the relationship with ministers” and give officials a greater incentive to challenge developments they believed were wrong.

He said: “If you have an SRO who knows that he or she is going to be hauled up in front of select committees and interrogated . . . then I think you’re much more likely to have what is a very healthy thing in our system which is push-back. . . There’s a great phrase ‘speaking truth unto power’ and it’s very important – it doesn’t happen enough.

He added: “I’ve never had a civil servant come to me and say ‘Would you like us to stop doing this?’ The answer might easily be, ‘yes’.”

Comment:

Do ministers and boards of large private companies always have to commission their own independent reports to find out if their organisation’s biggest IT-based projects are failing? Probably.

The problem is not one of lying. Civil servants tend not to lie. Neither do senior executives when reporting to their boards. But the sin of omission – the art of not telling the truth while not lying – is well practiced in public life.

A succession of IT-based project disasters in the US, Australia and the UK show that truth is the first casualty of any large failing IT-based project.

Barnet Council and Capita

It’s isn’t just IT-based projects that bring out the sin of omission. Outsourcing deals do too. Barnet Council’s outsourcing deal to Capita is mired in controversy over truth.

Why did Barnet’s officials give Capita £16m after saying that the council had no spare cash, and that Capita would make the necessary upfront IT investments?

Officials have given a long-winded explanation which is a little like the drawn-out, incomprehensible explanation a six year-old may give in the playground when teacher asks why he took his friend’s bar of chocolate.

Liverpool LDL, BT and excessive mark-ups?

Liverpool Direct Ltd, a joint venture between Liverpool council and BT, is also mired in a controversy over truth. According to the Liverpool Daily Post, Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis has questioned whether LDL is proving value for money. There are allegations of excessive mark-ups on IT and services supplied by BT to the council.

It seems that BT makes a mark-up on what it supplies to LDL and LDL makes a further mark-up on what it supplies to the council.

But a council spokesperson said: ““The mark up incorporates a calculation of the cost of setting up a particular piece of hardware or software by LDL. The important figure is the profit after tax per item which is much lower, and on some items, LDL actually makes a loss.”

The minister said Liverpool Council needed to open up its books if it wants to insist it gets value for money from the BT deal. Will Liverpool Council open up?

Hardly.

Politicise parts of the civil service?

There is a strong argument for politicising the top echelons of the civil service so that ministers are not so reliant on officials who are thought to be neutral but evidence shows can be biased towards good news and suppressing the bad.

Ministers and boards of large companies do not need various versions of the truth when things go wrong. They need their own version.

As Richard Nixon said when accepting the presidential nomination in 1968 [pre-Watergate]:

“Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth—to see it like it is, and tell it like it is—to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.”

Doubtless Nixon believed it when he said it. Just as countless officials and executives in public and private life believe they are speaking the truth when they ministers and boards on their big IT-based projects. It may be the truth. But how much of it are they telling?

Update:

In a tweet BrianSJ3 makes a great suggestion: Genchi Genbutsu – “go and see for yourself” he says.

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, Capita, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, IT projects, IT-related failures, local democracy, local government, public-private partnerships, Universal Credit

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Did DWP mislead MPs and media over Universal Credit?

Posted on 07/11/2013 | 2 comments

By T0ny Collins

Today’s report of the all-party Public Accounts Committee “Universal Credit: early progress” goes beyond criticisms of the scheme in a National Audit Office report of the same name on 5 September 2013.

Public Accounts MPs say the Department for Work and Pensions gave “misleading interviews to the press regarding progress after it became aware of difficulties with the programme”.

And as recently as July 2013 the “Department denied that there were problems with the programme’s IT when it gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee”.

These criticisms are against a background of the DWP’s refusal to publish any of the many internal and external reports the department has commissioned on the project’s progress, problems and challenges since 2011.

The Times today says that work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and members of his parliamentary team are “understood to have approached at least three Tory MPs on the cross-party [Public Accounts] committee to ask them to ensure that Robert Devereux, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, was singled out for censure”.  In the end there was only limited criticism in the PAC report of Devereux – under his formal title of “Accounting Officer”.

Comment

If the DWP has been misleading the press, giving incorrect evidence to Parliament, and keeping secret its reports on the problems and challenges facing one of the government’s most important IT-based programmes – all of which seem to be the case – is it an institution that regards itself as uniquely outside the democratic process?

On big IT projects, officials are not motivated by money and concern for their jobs as are private sector boards of directors. When a private company gets it wrong and loses tens of millions on a project, the share price may fall, individual bonuses may be hit, and jobs, including the CEO’s, may be at risk.

In the public sector getting it wrong rarely has any implications for officials. They have only the threat of departmental embarrassment as a deterrent to getting it wrong. But they need not fear even embarrassment if they can mislead the press and Parliament and keep secret all their internal and external reports.

If a lack of transparency, culture of denial, and the misleading of Parliament continue to characterize big risky IT-based ventures in central government, one has to ask whether Whitehall is congenitally ill-suited to running such programmes.

The Public Accounts Committee warned in a report in 1984 about the risks of large public sector computer programmes. That report came after a series of project disasters.

So what has been learned in the last 30 years – other than that central departments are poorly equipped managerially – or democratically – to handle big IT-based programmes and projects?

These are some of the Public Accounts Committee’s findings:

MPs try to be positive

“We believe that meeting any specific timetable is less important than delivering the programme successfully. There is still the potential for Universal Credit to deliver significant benefits, but there is no clarity yet on the amount of savings it will achieve.”

Culture of denial

“The programme had also developed a flawed culture of reporting good news and denying that problems had emerged. This culture resulted from the desire of senior staff within the programme to show publically that they were able to push the programme forward, at the expense of ensuring that adequate controls were in place or listening to concerns raised about its delivery.

“Although the Department has tried to tackle this culture, it gave misleading interviews to the press regarding progress after it became aware of difficulties with the programme, and as recently as July 2013 the Department denied that there were problems with the programme’s IT when it gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee.”

Shocking absence of control over suppliers

“There has been a shocking absence of control over suppliers with the Department neglecting to implement basic procedures for monitoring and authorising expenditure…

“The Department recognises its supplier management has been weak, risking value for money.  Four main suppliers – Accenture, IBM, Hewlett Packard and British Telecom – have provided IT systems for Universal Credit, and by March 2013 the Department had paid them £265m out of the £303m spent with suppliers on IT systems.

“In February 2013 the Major Projects Authority found no evidence of the Department actively managing its supplier contracts, resulting in suppliers being out of control and financial controls not being in place.  The Department has yet to provide a comprehensive assessment of how much of this expenditure has proved nugatory, although the Major Projects Authority believes it will be a substantial figure running into hundreds of millions of pounds.”

Lack of oversight

The lack of oversight allowed the Department’s Universal Credit team to become isolated and defensive, undermining its ability to recognise the size of the problems the programme faced and to be candid when reporting progress…

“Oversight has been characterised by a failure to understand properly the nature and enormity of the task, a failure to monitor and challenge progress regularly, and a failure to intervene promptly when problems arose.

“Senior managers only became aware of problems through ad hoc reviews, mostly conducted by external reviewers, as inadequate management information and reporting arrangements had not alerted them that things were amiss.

“Given its huge importance to the Department, the Accounting Officer [Robert Devereux] and his team should have been more alert to identifying and acting on early warning signs that things were going wrong with the programme

Blinkered culture remains?

“Risk was not well managed and the divergence between planned and actual progress could and should have been spotted and acted upon earlier. The Department only reported good news and denied the problems that had emerged. The risk of a similarly blinkered culture remains as the Department will be working to tight timescales to get the programme back on track.”

Problems hidden

“It is extremely disappointing that the litany of problems in the Universal Credit Programme were often hidden by a culture prevalent in the Department which promoted only the telling of ‘good news’.

“For example, officials were aware that a critical report highlighting many of these issues had been discussed internally for months. Indeed, there are real doubts over when officials became aware of these problems and it is difficult to conceive, based on the evidence we were presented with, that officials within the Department did not know of them before July 2012.”

Shocking absence of financial and other controls

“There has been a shocking absence of financial and other internal controls and we are not yet convinced that the Department has robust plans to overcome the problems that have impeded progress.”

Did the DWP do anything well?

“The Department initially adopted a piecemeal approach to delivering the programme.

“In 2011 it identified over a hundred different types of users for Universal Credit, and initially sought to design IT solutions for each set of circumstances individually. It was only in early 2012 that the Department decided to stand back and try to establish a clearer picture of what the programme’s overall shape might look like.

“During the summer of 2012 the Department became aware of the problems that Universal Credit faced. It was first alerted by concerns raised in a supplier-led review, commissioned by the Secretary of State, which reported in July.

“The Department subsequently established that the programme’s progress was stalling because there were a number of unresolved issues which had become intractable, particularly relating to the level of security needed for identity assurance and protection against fraud and error and cyber-attack.

“The Department had been previously unaware of the programme’s difficulties because its internal lines of monitoring, intervention and defence, intended to identify and mitigate such problems, were not working properly. Governance arrangements were not remotely adequate, and the Accounting Officer [Robert Devereux] discussed progress with the head of the Universal Credit programme only every two or three weeks.

“The Department had inadequate performance information to scrutinise and challenge the programme’s reports of its progress, so internal reporting arrangements did not flag up that things were amiss. The Department’s corporate finance undertook insufficient work to ensure there was an appropriate control environment in place, and the Department’s process for ministers to sign-off higher-value contracts was weak.

“The Department’s senior management had relied on ad hoc reviews, mostly conducted by external reviewers, which only provided an occasional snapshot of the programme, instead of ensuring effective internal systems were in place to monitor and challenge progress. However, during 2012 the problems surfaced more clearly as the Universal Credit team became unable to respond to recommendations made by such reviews.”

Will Universal Credit ever work?

“The Department remains uncertain about key details of its final plans. It does not know how much can be delivered online, when this will be available, and what activities will continue to require face-to-face meetings.

“ The Department also does not know what the final cost of the IT will be, or the savings the programme is expected to deliver. Nor does it know when it will close down the other benefits that Universal Credit will replace.”

The Department has a target of enrolling 184,000 claimants on Universal Credit by April 2014 and has launched limited pilot schemes.”

Says the PAC report: “The current rate of progress is significantly below target, however. Only around 2,500 claimants were registered at the time of our hearing in September, and the Department was unwilling to speculate what number will be enrolled by next April.”

In a steady state Universal Credit is expected to deal with 10 million people in about 7.5 million households, making 1.6 million changes in circumstances each month.

Security versus usability

“The Department is aware that the system must include suitable security arrangements if Universal Credit is to operate effectively and deliver its intended benefits.  However, the Department has not yet finalised such a solution, and was unable to say when two key components – those countering fraud and error and confirming claimants’ identity- would be completed.

“The Department has found it particularly hard to establish the right balance between security and usability. The development of an effective security system has been hindered by security not being integral to the design of IT components from the outset, but instead being retro-fitted into systems, and suppliers working on different assumptions and to different standards. To address this, the Department told us it has now brought security issues together in one place, with one senior official responsible for overseeing this part of the programme.”

DWP response to PAC report

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson told the BBC

“This report doesn’t take into account our new leadership team, or our progress on delivery,” it said. “We have already taken comprehensive action including strengthening governance, supplier management and financial controls.”

The DWP said it did not accept “the write-off figure quoted by the committee” and expected it to be substantially less”.

A spokesman for Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC that he had “every confidence” in the team now running the programme, including Mr Devereux – whose position  some newspapers have suggested is under threat.

“Both the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee acknowledged a fortress mentality within the Universal Credit programme,” he said.

“Iain was clear back in the summer about how he and the permanent secretary took action to fix those problems.”

PAC report: Universal Credit: early progress

National Audit Office report: Universal Credit: early progress

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, change management, DWP, Government IT, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public services, Real-Time Information, Universal Credit

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Universal Credit – good for its IT suppliers?

Posted on 11/07/2013 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

The DWP is conceding in its own tangential way that the IT for Universal Credit is not up to scratch; and an article in the Daily Telegraph suggests that Universal Credit this year (and perhaps well beyond) will handle so few claimants that the calculations for the time being could be done by hand, or on a spreadsheet, and not automatically by IT systems. The Register, through anonymous sources, has confirmation of this.

The FT says there will be a progressive national rollout of the coalition’s welfare reform in just six additional jobcentres which it said was the “latest sign the project is falling behind schedule”. It added that a significant shake-up of the IT underpinning universal credit is under way. 

The DWP said David Pitchford, the Whitehall troubleshooter who took over the running of Universal Credit for three months, had been asked to “review” the IT and ministers had “accepted his recommendation that they should explore enhancing the IT for universal credit working with the government digital service”.

“Advancements in technology since the current system was developed have meant that a more responsive system that is more flexible and secure could potentially be built,” said the DWP.

The FT quoted Howard Shiplee, who has led the Universal Credit  project since May, as denying claims from MPs that the original IT had been dumped because it had not delivered. “The existing systems that we have are working, and working effectively,” he said.

He added that he had set aside 100 days not to stop the programme, but to reflect on where it has got to and start to look at the entire total plan.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, doesn’t concede that the  timetable for the implementation of Universal Credit has changed. He told the work and pensions committee on Wednesday that numbers of claimants would ramp up during 2014 and he insisted that all claimants would be on the system by 2017, as originally planned.

“We get fixated on things like IT; the reality is it’s about a cultural shift,” Duncan Smith told MPs.

Comment

Iain Duncan Smith makes it clear that his DWP staff and suppliers, with the help of HMRC, are implementing Universal Credit with extreme care. Labour’s  work and pensions spokesman Liam Byrne says the Universal Credit project is a shambles. The truth is hard to fathom.

For years the DWP has rejected press reports that the IT for Universal Credit was in trouble. It is able to do without fear of authoritative contradiction because it keeps secret all its consultancy reports on the state of the Universal Credit project, despite FOI requests.

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and his officials talk much about the need for openness and transparency. Isn’t it time they persuaded DWP officials to release their internal and external reports on the detailed challenges faced by suppliers and civil servants on Universal Credit and other major government IT projects?

All big government IT projects are characterised by secrecy and defensiveness, although a little information about them is in the vague and subjectively-worded Major Projects Authority annual report.

One by-product of departmental defensiveness and secrecy is that the IT suppliers – in Universal Credit’s case HP, IBM and Accenture – are likely to continue to be paid even if the project is halted and redesigned. It’s probable the suppliers would argue that they have successfully done what they were asked to do in the contract. Who knows what the truth is?

The DWP is in effect protecting its suppliers from public and parliamentary scrutiny. It has been this way for decades and nothing has changed.

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, Government IT, IBM, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, managing change, managing outsourced services, openness and transparency, operational issues, outsourcing, oversight, project management, public sector, public services, software quality, supplier relationships

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Whitehall to lose its best troubleshooter

Posted on 05/07/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

Fighting intransigence? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Political pressure

– No business case

– No agreed budget

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

– Sole solution approach (options not considered)

– Lack of Commercial capability – (contract / administration)

– No plan

– No timescale

– No defined benefits

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

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

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

 

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

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When Whitehall shuns statutory scrutiny

Posted on 25/06/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

In some ways central departments are deeply accountable.

They provide volumes of statistics and reports to the centre of government (Cabinet Office and Treasury) – as far as their limited management information systems will let them – and senior officers will sometimes answer questions from MPs on Parliamentary committees. Their permanent secretaries will meet colleagues in other departments every week.

At the same time, on things that really matter, some central departments – and councils – can be infinitely unaccountable. 

A report by the National Audit Office – which it says was researched and written unusually quickly, partly in response to parliamentary concern – gives a glimpse of how unaccountable central departments (and councils) can be.

When they don’t want to provide information they simply don’t – and nothing it seems can be done to force disclosure.

Power to ignore

With explicit and written approval from David Cameron the Cabinet Office has the power to mandate change in central departments. But senior officials can, if they wish, when faced with central requests for information, ignore, reject, deliberately misunderstand, confuse or minimise answers, or delay until the request no longer need be answered.

This ability of central departments to evade democratic and even statutory scrutiny surfaces in the NAO report Confidentiality clauses and special severance payments.

The report is into the gagging of public servants when they receive payments for ending their employments early. Rightly, the media’s coverage of the report focuses on the NAO’s concerns over gagging clauses that stop officials becoming whistleblowers. The FT said on Friday (21 June 2013)

“More than a thousand civil servants have signed gagging clauses that could stop them speaking out about problems, a system the [NAO] condemned as “unacceptable”.

What the national media apparently did not notice was that the NAO was unable to obtain all the information it had requested of departments.

“Despite the NAO’s statutory access rights, it received only 60 per cent of the compromise agreements requested from departments,” says the NAO.

The NAO has statutory rights of access to information held by departments. Indeed its Comptroller and Auditor General Amyas Morse certifies the accounts of all government departments and many other public sector bodies. The NAO says he has “statutory authority to examine and report to Parliament on whether departments and the bodies they fund have used their resources efficiently, effectively, and with economy”.

Avoiding NAO scrutiny

But some departments have not complied with the NAO’s requests, and one, the Department of Culture, Media & Sport, formally requested not to be involved in the NAO’s investigation.

Says the NAO report

“Unfortunately, some departments did not respond promptly to our requests, and were delayed by their legal teams’ questioning of our access rights.

The NAO adds

“The Department for Culture, Media & Sport requested not to be involved in this piece of work, a position which could not be resolved until after our fieldwork window had closed.

“We found it challenging to gain a complete picture of the use of confidentiality clauses as, by their nature, they are not openly discussed. Our work was also hampered by incomplete records, and access to data as outlined above.

“It took several attempts to identify the appropriate individuals within departments responsible for compromise agreements and the associated payments. We experienced delays in receiving data, and what departments provided was frequently incomplete or in a format that was difficult to collate and analyse.”

So what can the NAO do now it has been snubbed or, to put it in Whitehall-speak, has encountered departmental non-compliance with statutory access requests?

Little or nothing. The NAO has no power to punish. Through MPs on the Public Accounts Committee it can admonish. That is all.

Says the NAO:

“Given the innovative nature of this work, some initial difficulties were anticipated. We will continue to work with departments, the Treasury and Cabinet Office to explore ways in which we can obtain the evidence on a timelier basis. It is important that departments are able to respond more quickly to these investigations in the future.”

Councils too can evade democratic accountability. The NAO has no access rights to local authorities but councils are, in theory, subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In practice they can all but ignore the FOI legislation if they wish.

In March 2010, the Audit Commission published a report on severance payments to council chief executives. The study found that:

• agreed severance packages for 37 council chief executives totalled £9.5 million, 40 per cent of which were in pension benefits;

• three in every ten outgoing council chief executives received a pay-off;

• the average cost to councils of each severance package was almost double the annual basic salary, but in four cases was more than triple; and

• 79 per cent of mutually-agreed severance payments had a confidentiality clause.

But the NAO found that, in a recent survey of councils by a member of the public under the FoI Act, 52 councils refused to disclose information on their use of compromise agreements.

The good news

The NAO says: “Some organisations have chosen to be transparent about severance packages, such as NHS National Services Scotland, who agreed to the disclosure of a director’s remuneration package, despite a confidentiality agreement being in place, following consultation with legal advisers.”

Comment:

How is Francis Maude to reform central government, particularly IT, if officials in central departments can apparently do what they wish?

The NAO found cases of payments that were higher than contractual entitlement, where there was the apparent reward for failure, and no attempt to seek Treasury’s approval.  Is all this lawful? 

On top of this there are departmental officials who avoided the NAO’s statutory requests for information.

If they can circumvent the law they can probably resist any central demands for change. Resistance seems to be regarded within departments as honourable.

One irony is that bureaucrats in Russia probably have little choice but to respond to central demands – whereas officials in Whitehall departments don’t have to.

Radical reform to change Whitehall’s outdated and costly ways is unlikely to happen while senior officers in departments run the system and have the final say.

NAO report “Confidentiality clauses and special severance payments“

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Posted in Campaign4Change, change management, cost reduction, Freedom of Information, governance, government, Government IT, local democracy, local government, managing change, oversight, Politics, private sector lessons for the public sector, public sector

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Francis Maude boasts of £10bn savings but …

Posted on 03/06/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins 

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

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

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

The breakdown of the £10bn savings:

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

Comment

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

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

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

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

“Savings to date have differing degrees of sustainability.”

The NAO also said this:

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

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

And this:

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

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

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

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

Efficiency and Reform 2012/13 savings. Summary report.

Some suppliers still resistant to change? – Government Computing.

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

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Is Major Projects annual report truly ground-breaking?

Posted on 29/05/2013 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, describes as “nothing short of groundbreaking” a report of the Major Projects Authority which gives the RAG (Rred/Amber/Green) status of more than 100 major projects.

That the report came out late on Friday afternoon as most journalists were preparing to go home, some of them for the whole bank holiday weekend, suggests that the document was a negotiated compromise: it would be published but in such a way as to get minimal publicity.

Indeed the report is a series of compromises. It has the RAG status of projects but not the original text that puts the status into context.

Another compromise: senior civil servants in departments have persuaded Maude to publish the RAG decisions when they are at least six months old.

This enables departmental officials to argue their case in the “narrative” section of the MPA annual report that a red or amber/red decision is out-of-date and that there has been significant improvement since. This is exactly the DWP’s justification for the amber/red status on Universal Credit.

The DWP says in the MPA report: “This rating [amber/red] dates back to September 2012, more than seven months ago. Since then, significant progress has been made in the delivery of Universal Credit. The Pathfinder was successfully launched and we are on course both to expand the Pathfinder in July 2013 and start the progressive national roll-out of Universal Credit in October.”

That the Pathfinder was launched successfully might have nothing to do with Universal Credit’s amber/red status which could be because of uncertainties over how the IT will perform at scale, given the complexities and interdependencies.  The MPA report says nothing about the uncertainties and risks of Universal Credit.

More compromises in the MPA annual report: the Cabinet Office appears to have allowed departments to hide their cost increases on projects such as HMRC’s Real-time Information [RTI] in the vague phrase “Total budgeted whole life costs (including non-government costs).”

The Cabinet Office has also allowed departments to write their own story to accompany the RAG status. So when HMRC writes its story on RTI it says that “costs have increased” but not by how much or why. We know from evidence that HMRC gave to the Public Accounts Committee that RTI costs have risen by “tens of millions of pounds”. There is nothing to indicate this in the MPA annual report.

Another compromise in the MPA annual report: there are no figures to compare the original forecast costs of a project with the projected costs now. There are only the 2012/13 figures compared with whole-life projected costs (including non-government projected spend).

And the MPA report is not comprehensive. It came out on the same day the BBC announced that it was scrapping its Digital Media Initiative which cost the public £98m. The MPA report does not mention the BBC.

The report is more helpful on the G-Cloud initiative, showing how cheap it is – about £500,000. But there is little information on the NHS National Programme for IT [NPfIT] or the Summary Care Record scheme. 

Yet the MPA annual report is ground-breaking. Since Peter Gershon, the then head of the Office of Government Commerce, introduced Gateway reviews of risky IT projects about 12 years ago with RAG decisions, they have remained unpublished, with few exceptions. The Cabinet Office is now publishing the RAG status of major departmental projects for the first time. Maude says

“A tradition of Whitehall secrecy is being overturned. And while previous Governments buried problems under the carpet, we are striving to be more open. By their very nature these works are high risk and innovative.

“They often break new ground and dwarf anything the private sector does in both scale and complexity. They will not always run to plan. Public scrutiny, however uncomfortable, will bring about improvement. Ending the lamentable record of failure to deliver these projects is our priority.”

Comment

The MPA annual report is a breath of fresh air.

Nearly every sentence, nearly every figure, represents compromise. The report reveals that the Universal Credit project was last year given an amber/red status – but it doesn’t say why. Yet the report has the DWP’s defence of the amber/red decision. So the MPA report has the departmental defences of the RAG decisions, without the prosecution evidence. That’s a civil service parody of openness and accountability: Sir Humphrey is allowed to defend himself in public without the case against him being heard.

But it’s still useful to know that Universal Credit is at amber/red.  It implies well into the project’s life that the uncertainties and risks are great. A major project at amber/red at this stage, a few months before go-live, is unlikely to turn green in the short term, if ever.

Congratulations

The Cabinet Office deserves congratulations for winning the fight for publication of the RAG status of each major project. Lord Browne, the government’s lead non-executive director and a member of the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform group, has said  that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being frittered away because of “worryingly poor” management of government projects.

“Nobody ever stops or intervenes in a poor project soon enough. The temptation is always to ignore or underreport warning signs,” he says.

The management of some large projects – usually not the smaller ones – is so questionable that departments ignore advice to have one senior responsible owner per major project, says the MPA.

The MPA annual report will not stop the disasters. Its information is so limited that it will not even enable the public – armchair auditors – to hold departments to account. Senior civil servants have seen to that.

But the report’s publication is an important development: and it provides evidence of the struggle within Whitehall against openness. Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake, head of the civil service, have had to fight to persuade departmental officials to allow the RAG status of projects to be published. The Guardian’s political editor Patrick Wintour says of the MPA annual report

“Publication led to fierce infighting in Whitehall as government departments disputed the listings and fought to prevent publication.”

Large-scale change

If Maude and Kerslake struggled to get this limited distance, and there is still so much left to reform, will large-scale change ever happen?

Maude and his officials have as comprehensive mandate for change from David Cameron as they could hope for. Yet still the Cabinet Office still seems to have little influence on departments. When it comes to the big decisions, Sir Humphrey and his senior officials hold onto real power. That’s largely because the departments are responsible to Parliament for their financial decisions – not the Cabinet Office.

Maude and his team have won an important battle in publishing the MPA annual report. But the war to bring about major change is still in its very early stages; and there’s a general election in 2015 that could halt Maude’s reform plans altogether.

The Major Projects Authority Annual Report.

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Posted in capacity building, change, change management, DWP, excessive secrecy, Gateway reviews, Government IT, HMRC, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, private sector lessons for the public sector, procurement, project management, public sector, public services, Universal Credit

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

Posted on 09/05/2013 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Management of big projects better but still generally poor? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Departments still sceptical of Maude’s reforms?

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

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

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

Comment

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

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

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

Telegraph article

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

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