Tag Archives: SME government contracts

Will MPs’ report on Capita’s BBC contract make any difference?

Posted on 26/04/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

At one level, Capita’s contract to handle most of the BBC’s TV licensing work is, in general, a success, at least according to statements made to the media.

Were it not for the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, a fuller story would not have emerged.

Today in The Guardian, a BBC spokesperson speaks of the Capita TV licensing contract in glowing terms. Through the contract, the BBC has reduced collection costs by 25% and increased revenue for programmes and services.

A Capita spokesperson spoke in similar terms. Capita has helped the BBC to collect more TV licence fee revenue every year since 2010-2011.

The only blip in the contract had seemed to be the heavy-handed tactics of some Capita staff. The Daily Mail reported in February 2017 that vulnerable people were hounded as some Capita staff tried to catch 28 TV licence evaders a week for bonuses of £15,000 a year.

This blip aside, has anything else gone wrong? There’s no hint of any technological problems on Capita’s website – or the BBC’s.

The BBC reported in 2011 that Capita will transform the TV licensing service, “using advances in technology and analytics to increase revenue and reduce costs”.

Capita’s website has a case study on its work for the BBC that refers to cost savings of £220m over the life of the contract, organisation-wide efficiencies and “protected brand image” among other benefits.

In December 2016, Capita described the “partnership” with the BBC as a “success”.

The bigger picture

Capita processes TV licence payments, collects arrears and enforces licence fee collection. Its current contract with the BBC began in July 2012 and, after a recent renegotiation, ends in 2022 with the option to extend by up to a further five years.The BBC paid Capita £59 million in 2015–16.

The BBC has had a long-standing ambition to improve its main TV licensing databases so that they are structured by individual customers rather than households.

This was one of the hopes for the contract with Capita but it hasn’t happened. Capita had partly subcontracted work on the BBC’s legacy databases to CSC Computer Sciences.

Manual workarounds

The BBC, in its contract with Capita, aimed to upgrade ICT as part of a wider transition programme. The BBC paid Capita £22.9m for parts of the programme that were delivered, including restructuring contact centres, updating the TV Licensing website and upgrading handheld units for field staff.

The Public Accounts Committee says in today’s report,

“However, improvements with a contract value of £27.9m, primarily related to replacing legacy ICT systems, were not delivered by Capita and its subcontractor (CSC), and were not paid for by the BBC.

“As a result of the transition programme being only partly completed and subsequently stopped, the BBC and Capita currently have to do resource-intensive manual workarounds between inefficient ICT systems.

“Capita informed us that it was bearing the additional costs associated with undelivered elements of the transition programme. However, the BBC has had to allocate £9m to Capita to support the ongoing use of legacy systems, costs which the BBC told us were compensated for elsewhere in the renegotiated contract.

“It is unclear to us why ICT database improvements have proved so difficult over the last 15 years, particularly when competitors and other organisations can make similar changes.

“The BBC acknowledges that its current database is not fit for purpose for the future but does not yet have a clear plan to replace it.”

Comment

All outsourcing contracts have their strengths and failures – including early promises that don’t come to anything.

But it’s unlikely councils and other public sector organisations that are seriously considering outsourcing will take into account the past failures and broken promises of their potential suppliers.

If officials and councillors want to outsource IT and other services they probably will, whatever the record of their favoured potential suppliers.

They will see reports of the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee as biased towards negative disclosures.

Indeed the BBC and Capita, in their responses to today’s TV licensing report of the Public Accounts Committee, have drawn attention to the positive aspects of the report and not mentioned the technological failures.

Where does this leave councils and other organisations that are considering IT-related outsourcing and are seeking reference sites as part of the bid process?

Will those reference sites give only the positive aspects and not mention, or successfully deprecate, any media, PAC or NAO reports on contract failures?

Negative findings by the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee are usually important. Were it not for their scrutiny would not know how public money is being spent and misspent.

But their reports will have little or no effect as warnings to organisations that want to outsource.

Public Accounts Committee – BBC Licence Fee – 26 April 2017

2 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita, IT-related failures, local government, managing outsourced services, National Audit Office, outsourcing

Tagged BBC, SME government contracts

What Google looks for when hiring staff … traits Whitehall’s culture abhors?

Posted on 14/02/2017 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The contrast between what Google looks for when hiring staff and what Whitehall looks for when making some of its top appointments, could give clues as to why many government IT-based projects and programmes fail.

First, the strengths Google looks for. These were set out yesterday on BBC R4 by Laszlo Bock, human resources chief at Google for 10 years.

Google was named “Best Company to Work For” more than 30 times around the world and received over 100 awards as a top employer during Bock’s time.

In 2010, he was named “Human Resources Executive of the Year”. Under him, Google changed its clunky, arduous recruitment processes that relied on gimmicks like maths puzzles to those that helped the company grow to about 60,000 employees in less than two decades.

In 2015 he published his first book, The New York Times bestseller Work Rules!, a practical guide to help people find meaning in work and improve the way they live and lead. He resigned from Google in 2016.

On the BBC “Analysis” programme on Monday evening – which looked at intelligence and talent and what they mean, if anything, in job interviews – Bock said the least important attribute Google screens for is whether someone knows about the job they are taking on. Crunching the data on successful hiring led Google instead to look for these characteristics:

Humility
Conscientiousness
A sense of responsibility not to quit until the job is done well
Comfort with ambiguity
A sense of fun
Courage

Why courage?

Bock said,

“It’s about the importance of people being able to raise their voices in organisations. One of the things that happens is, when organisations get large, people stop raising their voices and really bad things happen as a result. That’s where you get whistleblowing, insider trading, all kinds of things.

“Human beings are evolved, biologically, as social, hierarchy-seeking animals. We tend to conform. So courage is important because the really innovative, creative stuff comes from ‘I got this crazy idea’ and the bad problems get flagged by people who are willing to raise their hand and say ‘I don’t think this is a good thing to do’.

“Without that you can’t do great things.”

Comment

It’s too easy to generalise about the hiring and appointment of senior civil servants. But it’s possible to understand a little about the hiring culture within Whitehall’s biggest department, the Department for Work and Pensions.

An insight into DWP culture and thinking can be gleaned from the many Lever arch folders of documents filed by the DWP as part of an FOI case in which it spent several years fighting to stop the release of documents about the Universal Credit IT programme.

The documents include DWP witness statements on the “harm” that would be caused if the IT documents in question were published.

The judge in the case, Chris Ryan, challenged most of the DWP’s arguments.

In one of his rulings, Judge Ryan described the DWP’s claims as:

alarming and surprising
overstated
unconvincing
close to fanciful

He said that public confidence in the Universal Credit IT programme had been maintained for some time “on a false basis”; and he raised the possibility that an “unhealthily collegiate relationship had developed” between the DWP and private sector IT suppliers. [Campaign4Change will publish a separate blog post on this ruling in the next few days.]

As well as the insight into DWP culture that one can gain from the FOI case, it’s possible to gauge culture and thinking within Whitehall departments from the talented, free-thinking IT individualists who have joined the top layer of the civil service, quit and returned to the private sector.

It would be invidious to pick out some names as there are so many.

What all this suggests is that Whitehall’s culture appreciates conformity and consensus and shuns boat-rocking.

When top IT professionals who joined HMRC and the DWP spoke publicly at conferences about institutional problems that needed to be tackled, mandarins reacted quickly – and such disclosures were never repeated.

And after a leak to the Guardian about the results of a DWP staff survey of morale on the Universal Credit IT programme, the department launched a formal leak inquiry headed by a senior member of the security services.

At the same time, Universal Credit IT programme documents were no longer emailed but transferred around in taxis.

This bout of nervous introspection (the judge described the DWP’s arguments in the FOI case as “defensive”) when taken together with what else we know, indicate that Whitehall’s culture is insular, distrustful and inimical to open challenge and problem-solving (though there are some within the senior Whitehall ranks who successfully defy that culture).

When Bock talks of conformity being a danger within large organisations he would not have had the DWP in mind – but he aptly describes its culture.

When he speaks about the “importance of people being able to raise their voices in organisations” he was probably unaware of the extent to which Whitehall culture abhors raised voices.

As Bock says, when people don’t raise their voices “really bad things happen as a result”. Perhaps the lack of internal challenge was one reason the NHS IT programme – NPfIT – lost billions of pounds, and the DWP’s Universal Credit programme went badly awry for several years.

When Bock says the “really innovative, creative stuff comes from ‘I got this crazy idea’, he could have been describing the culture of the Government Digital Service. But that refreshing GDS culture is being slowly choked by the conservatism of traditional Whitehall departments.

As Bock says, “the bad problems get flagged by people who are willing to raise their hand and say ‘I don’t think this is a good thing to do’.” But bad problems are things senior civil servants avoid talking about, even internally. A Disneyland”good news” culture pervades central departments.

A National Audit Office report on the Universal Credit programme referred to a “fortress mentality” within the DWP.

Maybe the consensus-seeking John Manzoni, head of the civil service, and his colleague Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary, could seek to employ Bock as an adviser on appointments and recruitment.

Bock’s brief? To turn around the senior civil service’s culture of conformity, groupthink, denial, selective use of “good news” facts and a lack of open challenge.

Recognising the destructiveness within a big organisation of having the wrong culture – as Bock does – could be the start of a genuine Whitehall transformation.

BBC R4 “Analysis” on talent, intelligence and recruitment

Laszlo Bock steps down

2 Comments

Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, culture, DWP, excessive secrecy, Google, Government digital Service, Government IT, IT-enabled projects and waste, IT-related failures, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, npfit, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

Tagged Cabinet Office, npfit, SME government contracts

Central buying of IT and other services is a bit of a shambles – just what Sir Humphrey wants?

Posted on 14/12/2016 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Cabinet Office entrance

Like the Government Digital Service, the Crown Commercial Service was set up as a laudable attempt to cut the huge costs of running central government.

The Cabinet Office under Francis Maude set up the Crown Commercial Service [CCS] in 2014 to cut the costs of buying common products and services for Whitehall and the wider public sector including the NHS and police.

It has a mandate to buy commodity IT, other products and services and whatever can be bought in bulk. It has had some success – for example with negotiating lower prices for software licences needed across Whitehall. The skills and knowledge of its civil servants are well regarded.

But, like the Government Digital Service, CCS has had limited support from permanent secretaries and other senior officials who’d prefer to protect their autonomy.

It has also been hindered by unachievable promises of billions of pounds in savings. Even CCS’s own managers at the time regarded the Cabinet Office’s plans for huge savings as over-optimistic.

Yesterday [13 December 2016] the National Audit Office published a report that questioned whether CCS has paid its way, let alone cut public sector costs beyond what civil and public servants could have achieved without it.

CCS employed 790 full-time equivalent staff in 2015/16 and had operating costs in one year alone of £66.3m

This was the National Audit Office’s conclusion:

“CCS has not achieved value for money. The Cabinet Office underestimated the difficulty of implementing joint buying for government. With no business case or implementation plan CCS ran into difficulties. Net benefits have not been tracked so it cannot be shown that CCS has achieved more than the former Government Procurement Service would have.

“However, the strategic argument for joint buying remains strong and CCS is making significant changes to improve future services.”

Some of the NAO’s detailed findings:

The public sector spends £2.5bn directly with CCS – £8bn less than originally forecast.
Seven departments buy directly through CCS – 10 fewer than originally forecast
The forecast of £3.3bn net benefits from the creation of CCS over the four years to 2017-18 are unlikely to materialise.
The National Audit Office says the actual net benefits of CCS to date are “unknown”.
The Cabinet Office did not track the overall benefits of creating CCS.
Most of the planned transfers of procurement staff from central departments and the wider public sector to CCS haven’t happened.
Where some of the workforce has transferred, some departments have rehired staff to replace those who transferred.
Departments continue to manage their own procurement teams, although they use CCS’s frameworks.
CCS was set up with the power to force central departments to use its bulk buying services. But that power wasn’t enforced.
The National Audit Office says it is “no longer clear whether CCS has a clear mandate that requires all departments to use it for direct buying… it no longer has a clear timetable or expectation that further departments will transfer staff or buying functions to CCS”.

It’s all a far cry from the expectations set by a Cabinet Office announcement in 2013 which said that CCS will “ensure maximum value for the taxpayer is extracted from every commercial relationship”.

The then Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said at the time,

“The new Crown Commercial Service will ensure a step change in our commercial capability, giving government a much tighter grip on all aspects of its commercial performance, from market engagement through to contract management.”

Comment

Why CCS has failed so far to make much difference to Whitehall’s costs is not clear. It seems to have been hit by a combination of poor management at the outset, a high turnover of senior officials and ludicrously high expectations, combined with a civil service reluctance in central departments and the wider public sector to cede control over procurement to CCS – even when it comes to common products and services.

The NAO report is a reminder of a fundamental flaw in the way government works: central departments can’t in practice be forced to do anything. They are a power unto themselves. The Cabinet Office has powers to mandate a change of practice and behaviour in central departments – to which Sir Humphrey can shrug his shoulders and change nothing

Even the Prime Minister is, in practice, powerless to force departments to do something they don’t want to do (except in the case of the miscarriage of justice that involved two Chinook pilots who were eventually cleared of gross negligence because the then defence secretary Liam Fox, through a series of manoeuvres, forced the MoD to set the finding aside).

The CCS may be doomed to failure unless the Cabinet Office rigorously enforces its mandate to make government departments use its buying services.

If the Cabinet Office does not enforce its power, Sir Humphrey will always protect his turf by arguing that the products and services his officials buy – including IT in general – are specific and are usually tailored to the department’s unique and complex needs.

Much to the relief of Sir Humphrey, Francis Maude, the battle-hardened enforcer at the Cabinet Office, has left the House of Commons. He has no comparable replacement.

Are all central initiatives aimed at making a real dent in the costs of running Whitehall now doomed to failure?

Sir Humphrey knows the answer to that; and he’s wearing a knowing grin.

Crown Commercial Service – National Audit Office report

2 Comments

Posted in Agile, Campaign4Change, change, change management, cost reduction, GDS, Government digital Service, Government IT, National Audit Office, private sector, procurement, public sector, public services

Tagged Cabinet Office, Efficiency and Reform Group, Francis Maude, government IT, SME government contracts

Capita share price falls to new 10-year low as it lowers profit forecast

Posted on 08/12/2016 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Capita’s share price has fallen to a new 10-year low today (8 December 2016) after chief executive Andy Parker warned that “near-term headwinds” would hit trading performance in the first half of 2017.

The company’s share price of 513p at lunchtime today was 9% down on yesterday’s close. A year ago it was around 1200p.

It’s the lowest price since July 2006.

The “headwinds” warning may cause some customers, particularly officials and ruling councillors in some local councils, to wonder whether their arrangements with Capita for outsourcing “transformations” and future IT-related investments will be affected.

Capita announced today that it intends to dispose of the majority of the Capita Asset Services division and a small number of other businesses which no longer fit Capita s core business strategy.

It says these actions will consolidate Capita’ s position as the UK’ s leading provider of customer and business process management services, while underpinning the company’ s balance sheet.

Chief executive Andy Parker said: ” We are committed to delivering good returns to shareholders, supported by a strong capital structure and a clear growth strategy. In recent months, we have reviewed our management structure, operating model, business portfolio and our leverage to ensure we are in the strongest position to support future profitable growth.

” In November, we announced changes to our management and business structure and today we are announcing our intention to sell the majority of our Capita Asset Services division and a small number of other businesses.

“We have also commenced a programme of cost reduction and investments to position the Company strongly for renewed future growth. Together, these actions will create a leaner Capita, focused on its core strengths and with a much stronger balance sheet.

” I am confident that the markets Capita addresses offer long-term structural growth. We are however currently facing some near-term headwinds, which continue to make 2016 a challenging year and will affect trading performance in the first half of 2017.

“Our long-term contracts provide us with good revenue visibility across the year and the structural and cost reduction actions we are taking now will support progress in the second half of 2017 and into 2018. We therefore currently expect a similar trading performance to 2016 in the full-year 2017.”

Capita expects revenue to be around £4.8bn and underlying profit before tax to be “at least” £515m, excluding the cost of restructuring, for the full-year to December 2016.

The company had previously forecast underlying full-year pre-tax profits to be between £535m and £555m.

” Our new divisions are now fully aligned to the markets in which they operate and the divisional sales teams are working seamlessly with the central major sales team to better address these markets and fuel greater organic growth in 2018 and beyond.

” The decisive steps we have recently taken and those we are announcing today make us a more resilient business, committed to generating organic growth, maintaining and then growing our dividend and delivering sustained value for shareholders. ”

He added, “The headwinds we have faced in the second half of 2016 will affect trading performance in the first half of 2017.

” Our long-term contracts provide us with good revenue visibility across the year and the structural and cost reduction actions we are taking now will support progress in the second half of 2017 and into 2018.

” We therefore currently expect a similar trading performance to 2016 in the full-year 2017. Our average cost of debt in 2017 will continue to rise as a result of the rolling off of our interest rate swaps.”

Its pipeline of work remains well below what it was earlier in the year, at £3.8bn today compared with £5.1bn in July.

Capita has a number of problem contracts which have yet to be fully resolved.

The Telegraph quotes Parker as saying today that he had put a £50m programme of cost reductions in place in order to stem some of the losses.

The firm’s IT Enterprise Services division has been particularly weak in the last three months, leading the company to make “extensive” management and structural changes. It has reduced its 78,000 staff by almost 3% and moved some services to India.

Parker told Reuters, “There’s been a fallaway in what we would call discretionary spend, like training and (providing) employee benefits. People are delaying making decisions on implementing technology, so there is a whole host of things going on.”

Today’s lowered profit forecast follows a profits warning in September that full-year underlying pre-tax profits would be £535m to £555m for 2016, instead of a previously forecast £614m.

The Guardian quoted analysts at Barclays as saying,

“So another outsourcer bites the bullet in order to deliver.

“Is it just unfortunate coincidence that nearly all the big UK outsourcers have suffered the indignity of having their accounting policies scrutinised, a string of contract disputes or issues resulting in multiple profit warnings, or is there a systemic issue across the sector?

“The latter is a function of contract complexity and risk – both of which have increased over the years, at a time when competitive tension has increased forcing the major players to offer more for less. What is also very clear is that big is not beautiful in this market.

” Both Capita and Serco increased their scale and scope through aggressive M&A in order to access broader market opportunities in adjacent market areas away from their historical core. That strategy is now in reverse.

“Sadly for Capita, they are selling the wrong bit, in our view.”

Record one-day fall in Capita’s share price – will customers care?

1 Comment

Posted in Campaign4Change, Capita

Tagged outsourcing, SME government contracts

Atos pleased after it’s cleared of “sharp practice”

Posted on 20/09/2016 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

A Cabinet Office review of the Whitehall contracts of IT services company Atos following a Public Accounts Committee allegation of “sharp practice” has more than exonerated the supplier.

After looking at 12 Atos government contracts, the Cabinet Office has written to the Public Accounts Committee praising Atos for going beyond its contractual obligations. Where the company has fallen short, it has taken remedial steps.

Rarely are any government statements on an IT supplier replete with praise.

It’s likely the vindication will take some MPs by surprise after failings in a project to gather and collect in one place data from all the various GP practice systems – the so-called General Practice Extraction Service.

Now Atos may in future be a position to use the statement as evidence, when bidding, of its success in delivering government IT services and projects.

Millions written off

In December 2015 the Public Accounts Committee was highly critical of Atos in its report on the extraction service project.

The NHS Information Centre accepted the system from Atos although it didn’t work properly. The Centre also made public announcements at the time on the system’s success. In fact the system had “fundamental design flaws” and millions of pounds was written off.

The Committee said,

“Very common mistakes from past projects were repeated, such as failing to adopt the right contracting approach, failing to ensure continuity of key staff on the project, and failing to undertake proper testing before accepting the system.

“GPES [General Practice Extraction Service] started some five years later than planned; it is over-budget; and it still does not provide the full service required.

“Atos, supplier for a key part of the system, may have met the letter of its contractual obligations but took advantage of a weak client by taking the client’s money while knowing full well that the whole system had not been properly tested.”

The Committee said that the NHS official who was chief executive of the Information Centre when it accepted the flawed system was “awarded total emoluments of £470,000 for the financial year 2012–2013 including a redundancy payment of £330,000”.

Tests

The Committee found that in its approach to the project, “Atos did not show an appropriate duty of care to the taxpayer”.

“We are not satisfied Atos provided proper professional support to an inexpert client and are very concerned that it appears to have acted solely with its own short term best interests in mind.

“Atos admitted that end-to-end testing should always be undertaken and that it was supposed to have happened in this case. However, NHS IC and Atos agreed a more limited test of the Atos component due to delays in completing other parts of the system.

“The Atos software passed this test, but after NHS IC accepted the system—and to Atos’s professed surprise—the system as a whole was found not to work. Atos claims it fixed the issues relating to its software at its own expense and that the additional £1.9 million it received while doing so was for additional work related to 15 new features.

“We found that Atos’s chief executive, Mr Adrian Gregory—the company’s witness in our enquiry—appeared rather indifferent to the plight of the client; we expect more from those contracting with government and receiving funds from the taxpayer.”

“Sharp practice”

The Committee recommended that the Cabinet Office undertake a “full review of Atos’s relationships as a supplier to the Crown”.

“We expect the Cabinet Office to note carefully this example of sharp practice when determining what obligations a duty of care on contractors should entail and what sanctions would apply when performance falls short.”

The government agreed to have a review.

Findings of Cabinet Office review of Atos contracts

The Cabinet Office found no “examples of behaviour that might be described as sharp commercial practice in the course of this review”.

The review team looked at 12 Atos contracts worth a total of more than £500m a year – 80% of Atos’s work with central government.

No:	Department	Contract Name
1	Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)	Personal Independence Payments (PIP)
2	Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)	Government Gateway Agreement
3	Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)	ICT in support of medical assessments
4	HM Treasury (HMT)	National Savings and Investments (NS&I)
5	Ministry of Justice (MOJ)	Development, Innovation and Support Contracts (DISC) Infrastructure Services Agreement
6	Ministry of Justice (MOJ)	End User Computing Services (EUCS)
7	Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA)	Shared Service Alliance
8	Home Office (HO)	IND Procurement of Infrastructure Development and Support (IPIDS) Agreement
9	Home Office (HO)	Contain Agreement
10	Department of Health (DH)	Information Management Services (IMS 3)
11	Ministry of Defence (MOD)	Strategic Partner Framework Defence Core Network Services (DCNS01)
12	Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA)	ICT Managed Services Agreement (IS2003)

Far from finding examples of sharp practice, the review team found “examples to the contrary”. In some of the contracts, Atos was “working at risk” and going “beyond their contractual obligations to act in the client’s interests”.

“Specific examples include expediting change control notices at the client’s request in advance of formal approval, taking financial risk ahead of contract extensions and proactively supporting the redeployment of resource to assist in the avoidance of client cost. On one contract, a notice period for a number of major decommissioning events lapsed and Atos continued to deliver the services flexibly to the client’s requirements until the service could be safely decommissioned.”

Where Atos did not meet monthly performance targets, service penalties were incurred and charged to Atos. “It was evident that when operational performance fell short appropriate sanctions were applied.”

Commitment

The Cabinet Office went on to say that Atos proactively and constructively engaged in the review and provided information as requested, “sometimes over and above their contractual commitments”.

The review team added,

“It is clear that Atos values its relationship as a supplier to the Crown; it has a comprehensive approach to the governance of all the contracts reviewed and the Atos leadership team shows commitment to its customers.

“In response to the PAC [Public Accounts Committee] hearing Atos has undertaken a number of initiatives to address PAC’s concerns.

“The Atos corporate programme ‘Client at the Heart’ aims to deepen the client-focussed culture within the organisation by embedding a set of values and action plans to deliver improved service for each contract they run, including all government contracts.

“In addition, whilst employees have always been recognised for achievement in quantitative and qualitative objectives, financial targets vary but typically account for only a small proportion of total reward packages.

“We see this as evidence that Atos client executives are incentivised to provide the appropriate professional support.”

An Atos spokesman told civilserviceworld that the company was “proud to be a trusted supplier” and had welcomed the review as an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of its services.

“We are pleased that the Cabinet Office has concluded that we deliver the appropriate level of professional support to our government clients,” he said.

Comment

It’s clear that Atos deserves credit for going beyond the call of duty on some contracts. It is also clear that those departmental officials the Cabinet Office spoke to as part of the review were happy with Atos.

What’s not so clear is the extent to which civil servants in general are in a position to know how well their major IT suppliers are performing.

Evidence from National Audit Office reports is that departments may not always have comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date information – and enough staff time – to give sound judgements on how well a major IT supplier is performing on a complex contract.

Indeed the National Audit Office can be scathing about the quality of contract management within departments.

In 2013 the Audit Office, in its report “Universal Credit: early progress” identified a series of astonishing failings that, taken together, suggested that the DWP had little understanding of what its major IT suppliers were charging for, or why, let alone what their performance was like.

The DWP is the largest central government department – which leaves one to wonder whether some other departments, which have smaller budgets and fewer staff, are better or worse off in terms of understanding their IT contracts.

These were some of the contract management weaknesses at the DWP as identified by the National Audit Office in 2013:

Over-reliance on performance information that was provided by suppliers without Department validation.
Inadequate controls over what would be supplied, when and at what cost because deliverables were not always defined before contracts were signed.
Weak contractual relationships with supplier
The Department did not enforce all the key terms and conditions of its standard contract management framework, inhibiting its ability to hold suppliers to account.
Limited line of sight on cost of delivery, in particular between expenditure incurred and progress made in delivering outputs.
Poorly managed and documented financial governance, including for delegated financial authorities and approvals; for example 94 per cent of spending was approved by just four people but there is limited evidence that this was reviewed and challenged.
Limited IT capability and ‘intelligent client’ function leading to a risk of supplier self-review.
Insufficient review of contractor performance before making payments – on average six project leads were given three days to check 1,500 individual timesheets, with payments only stopped if a challenge was raised.
Ministers had insufficient information to assess the value for money of contracts before approving them.
Insufficient challenge of supplier-driven changes in costs and forecasts because the programme team did not fully understand the assumptions driving changes.

The Cabinet Office, in its review of Atos, found “inconsistencies” in departmental compliance with guidelines on contract management. It said,

“Where the evidence suggests that contract management is inconsistent [with National Audit Office guidelines on contract management] the Cabinet Office is discussing improvements with the contract owners in the Departments concerned.”

Praise where praise is due and Atos may well be a good – and perhaps outstanding – IT supplier to central government.

But if departments don’t have enough solid information on how well their major IT suppliers are performing, to what extent is any Cabinet Office statement praising an IT supplier likely to be a hopeful panegyric, based on what officials in departments believe they are expected to say?

Cabinet Office statement on Atos to the Public Accounts Committee – 8 September 2016

Public Accounts Committee report on Atos and the General Practice Extraction Service – December 2015

1 Comment

Posted in Atos, Campaign4Change, DWP, excessive secrecy, Government IT, IT security, IT successes, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

Tagged Cabinet Office, SME government contracts

Inside Universal Credit IT – analysis of document the DWP didn’t want published

Posted on 20/07/2016 | 9 comments

By Tony Collins

Written evidence the Department for Work and Pensions submitted to an FOI tribunal – but did not want published (ever) – reveals that there was an internal “lack of candour and honesty throughout the [Universal Credit IT] Programme and publicly”.

It’s the first authoritative confirmation by the DWP that it has not always been open and honest when dealing with the media on the state of the Universal Credit IT programme.

FOI tribunal grants request to publish DWP’s written submission

According to the DWP submission, senior officials on the Programme became so concerned about leaks that a former member of the security services was brought in to lead an investigation. DWP staff and managers were the subjects of “detailed interviews”. Employee emails were “reviewed”, as were employee access rights to shared electronic areas.

Staff became “paranoid” about accidentally leaving information on a printer. Some of the high-security measures appear still to be in place.

Unpublished until now, the DWP’s written legal submission referred, in part, to the effects on employees of leak investigations.

The submission was among the DWP’s written evidence to an FOI Tribunal in February 2016.

The Government Legal Service argued that the DWP’s written evidence was for the purposes of the tribunal only. It should not be published or passed to an MP.

The Legal Service went further: it questioned the right of an FOI Tribunal to decide on whether the submission could be published. Even so a judge has ruled that the DWP’s written evidence to the tribunal can be published.

Excerpts from the submission are here.

Analysis and Comment

The DWP’s submission gives a unique glimpse into day-to-day life and corporate sensitivities at or near the top of the Universal credit IT programme.

It reveals the lengths to which senior officials were willing to go to stop any authoritative “bad news” on the Universal Credit IT programme leaking out. Media speculation DWP’s senior officials do not seem to mind. What appears to concern them is the disclosure of any credible internal information on how things are progressing on Universal Credit IT.

Confidential

Despite multiple requests from IT suppliers, former government CIOs and MPs, for Whitehall to publish its progress reports on big IT-based change programmes (some examples below), all central departments keep them confidential.

That sensitivity has little to do with protecting personal data.

It’s likely that reviews of projects are kept confidential largely because they could otherwise expose incompetence, mistakes, poor decisions, risks that are likely to materialise, large sums that have been wasted or, worst of all, a project that should have been cancelled long ago and possibly re-started, but which has been kept going in its original form because nobody wanted to own up to failure.

On this last point, former government CIO and permanent secretary Ian Watmore spoke to MPs in 2009 about how to fix government IT. He said,

“An innovative organisation tries a lot of things and sometimes things do not work. I think one of the valid criticisms in the past has been when things have not worked, government has carried on trying to make them work well beyond the point at which they should have been stopped.”

Individual accountability for failure?

Oblivious to MPs’ requests to publish IT progress reports, the DWP routinely refuses FOI requests to publish IT progress reports, even when they are several years old, even though by then officials and ministers involved will probably have moved on. Individual accountability for failure therefore continues to be non-existent.

Knowing this, MPs on two House of Commons select committees, Public Accounts and Work and Pensions, have called for the publication of reports such as “Gateway” reviews.

This campaign for more openness on government IT projects has lasted nearly three decades. And still Whitehall never publishes any contemporaneous progress reports on big IT programmes.

It took an FOI campaigner and IT projects professional John Slater [@AmateurFOI] three years of legal proceedings to persuade the DWP to release some old reports on the Universal Credit IT programme (a risk register, milestone schedule and issues log). And he had the support of the Information Commissioner’s legal team.

When the DWP reluctantly released the 2012 reports in 2016 – and only after an informal request by the then DWP secretary of state Stephen Crabb – pundits were surprised at how prosaic the documents were.

Yet we now know, thanks to the DWP’s submission, the lengths to which officials will go to stop such documents leaking out.

Understandable?

Some at the DWP are likely to see the submission as explaining some of understandable measures any government department would take to protect sensitive information on its largest project, Universal Credit. The DWP is the government largest department. It runs some of the world’s biggest IT systems. It possesses personal information on nearly everyone in Britain. It has to make the protection of its information a top priority.

Others will see the submission as proof that the DWP will do all it can to honour a decades-old Whitehall habit of keeping bad news to itself.

Need for openness

It’s generally accepted that success in running big IT-enabled change programmes requires openness – with staff and managers, and with external organisations and agencies.

IT-based change schemes are about solving problems. An introspective “good news only” culture may help to explain why the DWP has a poor record of managing big and successful IT-based projects and programmes. The last time officials attempted a major modernisation of benefit systems in the 1990s – called Operational Strategy – the costs rose from £713m to £2.6bn and the intended objective of joining up the IT as part of a “whole person” concept, did not happen.

Programme papers“watermarked”

The DWP’s power, mandate and funding come courtesy of the public. So do officials, in return, have the right to keep hidden mistakes and flawed IT strategies that may lead to a poor use – or wastage – of hundreds of millions of pounds, or billions?

The DWP’s submission reveals that recommendations from its assurance reports (low-level reports on the state of the IT programme including risks and problems) were not circulated and a register was kept of who had received them.

Concern over leaks

The submission said that surveys on staff morale ceased after concerns about leaks. IT programme papers were no longer sent electronically and were delivered by hand. Those that were sent were “double-enveloped” and any that needed to be retained were “signed back in”. For added security, Universal Credit programme papers were watermarked.

When a former member of the security services was brought in to conduct a leaks investigation, staff and mangers were invited by the DWP’s most senior civil servant to “speak to the independent investigator if they had any information”. This suggests that staff were expected to inform on any suspect colleagues.

People “stopped sharing comments which could be interpreted as criticism of the [Universal Credit IT] Programme,” said the submission. “People became suspicious of their colleagues – even those they worked closely with.

“There was a lack of trust and people were very careful about being honest with their colleagues…

“People felt they could no longer share things with colleagues that might have an honest assessment of difficulties or any negative criticism – many staff believed the official line was, ‘everything is fine’.

“People, even now, struggle to trust colleagues with sensitive information and are still fearful that anything that is sent out via email will be misused.

“For all governance meetings, all documents are sent out as password protected, with official security markings included, whether or not they contain sensitive information.”

“Defensive”

Lines to take with the media were added to a “Rolling Brief”, an internal update document, that was circulated to senior leaders of the Universal Credit IT programme, the DWP press office and special advisors.

These “lines to take” were a “defensive approach to media requests”. They emphasised the “positive in terms of progress with the Programme without acknowledging the issues identified in the leaked stories”.

This positive approach to briefing and media management “led to a lack of candour and honesty through the Programme and publically …”

How the DWP’s legal submission came about is explained in this separate post.

Were there leaks of particularly sensitive information?

It appears not. The so-called leaks revealed imperfections in the running of the Universal Credit programme; but there was no personal information involved. Officials were concerned about the perceived leak of a Starting Gate Review to the Telegraph (although the DWP had officially lodged the review with the House of Commons library).

The DWP also mentioned in its statement a leak to the Guardian of the results of an internal “Pulse” survey of staff morale – although it’s unclear why the survey wasn’t published officially given its apparent absence of sensitive commercial, personal, corporate or governmental information.

NPfIT

The greater the openness in external communications, the less likely a natural scepticism of new ways of working will manifest in a distrust of the IT programme as a whole.

The NHS’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – then the UK’s biggest IT programme costing about £10bn – was dismantled in 2011 after eight fraught years. One reason it was a disaster was the deep distrust of the NPfIT among clinicians, hospital technologists, IT managers, GPs and nurses. They had listened with growing scepticism to Whitehall’s oft-repeated “good news” announcements.

Ex-Government CIO wanted more openness on IT projects

When MPs have asked the DWP why it does not publish reports on the progress of IT-enabled projects, it has cited “commercial confidentiality”.

But in 2009, Ian Watmore (the former Government CIO) said in answer to a question by Public Account Committee MP Richard Bacon that he’d endorse the publication of Gateway reviews, which are independent assessments of the achievements, inadequacies, risks, progress and challenges on risky IT-based programmes.

“I am with you in that I would prefer Gateway reviews to be published because of the experience we had with capability reviews (published reports on a department’s performance). We had the same debate (as with Gateway reviews) and we published them. It caused furore for a few weeks but then it became a normal part of the furniture,” said Watmore.

Capability reviews are no longer published. The only “regular” reports of Whitehall progress with big IT programmes are the Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s annual reports. But these do not include Gateway reviews or other reports on IT projects and programmes. The DWP and other departments publish only their own interpretations of project reviews.

In the DWP’s latest published summary of progress on the Universal Credit IT programme, dated July 2016, the focus is on good news only.

But this creates a mystery. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority gave the Universal Credit programme an “amber” rating in its annual report which was published this month. But neither the DWP nor the Authority has explained why the programme wasn’t rated amber/green or green.

MPs and even IT suppliers want openness on IT projects

In 2004 HP, the DWP’s main IT supplier, told a Work and Pensions Committee inquiry entitled “Making IT work for DWP customers” in 2004 that “within sensible commercial parameters, transparency should be maintained to the greatest possible extent on highly complex programmes such as those undertaken by the DWP”.

The Work and Pensions Committee spent seven months investigating IT in the DWP and published a 240-page volume of oral and written in July 2004. On the matter of publishing “Gateway” reviews on the progress or otherwise of big IT projects, the Committee concluded,

“We found it refreshing that major IT suppliers should be content for the [Gateway] reviews to be published. We welcome this approach. It struck us as very odd that of all stakeholders, DWP should be the one which clings most enthusiastically to commercial confidentiality to justify non-disclosure of crucial information, even to Parliament.”

The Committee called for Gateway reviews to be published. That was 12 years ago – and it hasn’t happened.

Four years later the Committee found that the 19 most significant DWP IT projects were over-budget or late.

In 2006 the National Audit Office reported on Whitehall’s general lack of openness in a report entitled “Delivering successful IT-enabled business change”.

The report said,

“The Public Accounts Committee has emphasised frequently the need for greater transparency and accountability in departments’ performance in managing their programmes and projects and, in particular, that the result of OGC Gateway Reviews should be published.”

But today, DWP officials seem as preoccupied as ever with concealing bad news on their big IT programmes including Universal Credit.

The costs of concealment

The DWP has had important DWP project successes, notably pension credits, which was listed by the National Audit Office as one of 24 positive case studies.

But the DWP has also wasted tens of millions of pounds on failed IT projects.

Projects with names such as “Camelot” [Computerisation and Mechanisation of Local Office Tasks] and Assist [Analytical Services Statistical Information System) were cancelled with losses of millions of pounds. More recently the DWP has run into problems on several big projects.

“Abysmal”

On 3 November 2014 the then chairman of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge spoke on Radio 4’s Analysis of the DWP’s ‘abysmal’ management of IT contracts.”

1984

As long ago as 1984, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee called for the civil service to be more open about its progress on major computer projects.

Today there are questions about whether the Universal Credit IT will succeed. Hundreds of millions has already been spent. Yet, as mentioned earlier, current information on the progress of the DWP’s IT programmes remains a state secret.

It’s possible that progress on the Universal Credit IT programme has been boosted by the irregular (but thorough) scrutiny by the National Audit Office. That said, as soon as NAO reports on Universal Credit are published, ministers and senior officials who have seen copies in advance routinely dismiss any criticisms as retrospective and out-of-date.

Does it matter if the DWP is paranoid about leaks?

A paper published in 2009 looks at how damaging it can be for good government when bureaucracies lack internal challenge and seek to impose on officials a “good news” agenda, where criticism is effectively prohibited.

The paper quoted the then Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev as saying, in a small meeting with leading Soviet intellectuals,

“The restructuring is progressing with great diﬃculty. We have no opposition party. How then can we control ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. Most important: through glasnost.”

Non-democratic regimes fear a free ﬂow of information because it could threaten political survival. In Russia there was consideration of partial media freedom to give incentives to bureaucrats who would otherwise have no challenge, and no reason to serve the state well, or avoid mistakes.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, was not acknowledged by Soviet oﬃcials for two days, and only then after news had spread across the Western media.

The paper argued that a lack of criticism could keep a less democratic government in power. But it can lead to a complacency and incompetence in implementing policy that even a censored media cannot succeed in hiding.

As one observer noted after Chernobyl (Methvin in National Review, Dec. 4, 1987),

“There surely must be days—maybe the morning after Chernobyl—when Gorbachev wishes he could buy a Kremlin equivalent of the Washington Post and ﬁnd out what is going on in his socialist wonderland.”

Red team

A lack of reliable information on the state of the Universal Credit IT programme prompted the then secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith to set up his own “red team” review.

That move was not known about at the time. Indeed in December 2012 – at a point when the DWP was issuing public statements on the success of the Universal Credit Programme – the scheme was actually in trouble. The DWP’s legal submission said,

“In summary we concluded (just before Christmas 2012) that the IT system that had been developed for the launch of UC [Universal Credit] had significant problems.”

One wonders whether DWP civil servants kept Duncan Smith in the dark because they themselves had not been fully informed about what was going on, or because they thought the minister was best protected from knowing what was going on, deniability being one key Whitehall objective.

But in the absence of reliable internal information a political leader can lose touch completely, said the paper on press freedom.

“On December 21, 1989, after days of local and seemingly limited unrest in the province of Timi¸ Ceausescu called for a grandiose meeting at the central square of Bucharest, apparently to rally the crowds in support of his leadership. In a stunning development, the meeting degenerated into anarchy, and Ceausescu and his wife had to ﬂee the presidential palace, only to be executed by a ﬁring squad two days later.”

Wrong assumptions

Many times, after the IT media has published articles on big government IT-based project failures, TV and radio journalists have asked to what extent the secretary of state was responsible and why he hadn’t acted to stop millions of pounds being wasted.

But why do broadcast journalists assume ministers control their departments? It is usually more likely that ministers know little about the real risks of failure until it is too late to act decisively.

Lord Bach, a minister at DEFRA, told a House of Commons inquiry in 2007 into the failure of the IT-based Single Payment Scheme that he was aware of the risks but still officials told him that systems would work as planned and farmers would receive payments on time. They didn’t. Chaos ensued.

Said Lord Bach,

“I do think that, at the end of the day, some of the advice that I received from the RPA [Rural Payments Agency] was over-optimistic.”

Another DEFRA minister at the time Lord Whitty, who was also party in charge of the Single Payment Scheme, told the same inquiry,

“Perhaps I ought also to say that this was the point at which I felt the advice I was getting was most misleading, and I have used the term ‘misleading’ publicly but I would perhaps prefer to rephrase that in the NAO terms …”

Even the impressive Stephen Crabb – who has now quit as DWP secretary of state – didn’t stand much of chance of challenging his officials. The department’s contracts, IT and other affairs, are so complex and complicated – there are bookcases full of rules and regulations on welfare benefits – that any new ministers soon find themselves overwhelmed with information and complexity.

They will soon realise they are wholly dependent on their officials; and it is the officials who decide what to tell the minister about internal mistakes and bad decisions. Civil servants would argue that ministers cannot be told everything or they would be swamped.

But the paper on press freedom said that in order to induce high eﬀort within a bureacucracy, the leader needs “veriﬁable information on the bureaucrats’ performance”.

The paper made a fascinating argument that the more complacent the bureaucracy, the more aggressively it would control information. Some oil-rich countries, said the paper, have less media freedom than those with scarcer resources.

“Consistent with our theory, [some] non-democratic countries … have vast resources and poor growth performance, while the Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore), while predominantly non-democratic in the 1970s and 1980s, have high growth rates and scarce natural resource.”

In an apparent opening up of information, the government in China passed a law along the lines of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (“China Sets Out to Cut Secrecy, but Laws Leave Big Loopholes,” New York Times, Apr. 25, 2007). But was this law self-serving? It, and the launch of local elections, provided the central government with relatively reliable information on the performance of provincial bosses.

These stories from less democratic countries may be relevant in Britain because politicians here, including secretaries of state, seem to be the last to know when a big IT-based programme is becoming a disaster.

Bad news

Whtehall’s preoccupation with “good news only” goes well beyond the DWP.

T auditors Arthur D Little, in a forensic analysis of the delays, cost over-runs and problems on the development of a huge air traffic control IT project for National Air Traffic Services, whose parent was then the Civil Aviation Authority, which was part of the Department for Transport, referred to an “unwillingness to face up to and discuss bad news”.

Ministers helpless to force openness on unwilling officials?

Francis Maude came to the Cabinet Office with a reforming zeal and a sophisticated agenda for forcing through more openness, but the effects of his efforts began to evaporate as soon as he left office. Even when he was at the height of his power and influence, he was unable to persuade civil servants to publish Gateway reviews, although he’d said when in opposition that he intended to publish them.

His negotiations ended with central departments agreeing to publish only the “traffic light” status of big projects – but only after a minimum delay of at least six months. In practice the delay is usually a year or more.

Brexit

Brexit campaigners argue that the EC is undemocratic, that decisions are taken in Brussels in secret by unelected bureaucrats. But the EC is at least subject to the scrutiny, sometimes the competing scrutiny, of 29 countries.

Arguably Whitehall’s departments are also run by unelected bureaucrats who are not subject to any effective scrutiny other than inspections from time to time of the National Audit Office.

Yes Minister parodied Sir Humphrey’s firm grip on what the public should and should not be told. Usually his recommendation was that the information should be misleadingly reassuring. This was close enough to reality to be funny. And yet close enough to reality to be serious as well. It revealed a fundamental flaw in democracy.

Nowhere is that flaw more clearly highlighted than in the DWP’s legal submission. Is it any surprise that the DWP did not want the submission published?

If officials had the choice, would they publish any information that they did not control on any of their IT projects and programmes?

That’s where the indispensable work of the National Audit Office comes into the picture – but it alone, even with the help of the Public Accounts Committee, cannot plug the gaping hole in democracy that the DWP’s submission exposes.

These are some thoughts I am left with after reading the legal submission in the light of the DWP’s record on the management of IT-based projects …

Press freedom and the free flow of information cannot be controlled in a liberal democracy. But does Whitehall have its own subtle – and not so subtle – ways and means?

In light of the DWP’s track record, the public and the media are entitled to distrust whatever ministers and officials say publicly about their own performance on IT-related programmes, including Universal Credit.

More worryingly, would the DWP’s hierarchy care a jot if the media and public didn’t believe what the department said publicly about progress on big projects such as Universal Credit?

Is the DWP’s unofficial motto: Better to tell a beautiful lie than an ugly truth?

AL Kennedy mentioned the “botched” Universal Credit programme when she gave a “point of view” on Radio 4 last week. Not referring specifically to Universal Credit she said facts can be massaged but nature can’t be fooled. A girder that won’t hold someone’s weight is likely to fail however many PR-dominated assurance reports have gone before. “Facts are uncompromising and occasionally grim. I wish they weren’t. Avoiding them puts us all at increased risk,” she said.

Excerpts from the DWP submission

Some Twitter comments on this post:

9 Comments

Posted in Accenture, Agile, Campaign4Change, change management, China, culture, DEFRA, Department of Health, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Gateway reviews, governance, Government digital Service, Government IT, HP, Institute for Government, IT projects, IT successes, IT-related failures, Legacy ICT, LPfIT, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, npfit, private sector lessons for the public sector, project management, public services, supplier relationships, Universal Credit

Tagged agile, Cabinet Office, Efficiency and Reform Group, Francis Maude, npfit, SME government contracts

Another fine NHS IT mess

Posted on 02/07/2015 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Today the National Audit Office reports on the General Practice Extraction Service, an IT system that allows patient data to be extracted from all GP practices in England.

The report says that Department of Health officials – who were then working for the NHS Information Centre – signed off and paid for a contract even though the system was unfit for use. The original business case for the system grossly underestimated costs.

And the system was developed using the highest-risk approach for new IT – a combination of agile principles and traditional fixed-price contract.

Some of the officials involved appear to be those who worked for NHS Connecting for Health – the organisation responsible for what has become the UK’s biggest IT-related failure, the £10bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

As with the NPfIT it is unlikely anyone responsible for the latest failure will be held accountable or suffer any damage to their career.

The NAO says officials made mistakes in the original procurement. “Contract management contributed to losses of public funds, through asset write-offs and settlements with suppliers.” More public money is needed to improve or replace the system.

Labour MP Meg Hillier MP, the new chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, sums up today’s NAO’s report:

“Failed government IT projects have long been an expensive cliché and, sadly for the taxpayer and service user, this is no exception.

“The expected cost of the General Practice Extraction Service ballooned from £14m to £40m, with at least £5.5m wasted on write-offs and delay costs.

“GPES has managed to provide data for just one customer – NHS England – and the data was received 4 years later than originally planned.

“While taxpayers are left picking up the tab for this failure, customers who could benefit, such as research and clinical audit organisations, are waiting around for the system to deliver what they need to improve our health service.”

Some GPs who do not want patient data to be extracted from their systems – they believe it could compromise their bond of confidentiality with patients – may be pleased the extraction system has failed to work properly.

But their concern about patient confidentiality being compromised will not make the failure of the extraction service any more palatable.

The NAO says it only learned of the failure of the extraction system through its financial audit of the Health and Social Care Information Centre. It learned that the system was not working as expected and that HSCIC had agreed to pay additional charges through a settlement with one of the main suppliers, Atos IT Services UK Ltd.

An NHS Connecting for Health legacy?

Work on the GP Extraction Service project began in 2007, first by the NHS Information Centre, and then by the HSCIC.

The NHS Information Centre closed in 2013 and responsibility transferred to the HSCIC which combines the Department of Health’s informatics functions – previously known as NHS Connecting for Health or CFH – and the former NHS Information Centre.

What went wrong

The original business case said the extraction service would start in 2009-10, but it took until April 2014 for HSCIC to provide the first data extract to a customer.

Meanwhile other potential users of the system have found alternative sources of patient data in the absence of the HSCIC system.

The NAO says that officials changed the procurement strategy and technical design for the GPES extraction systems during the project. “This contributed to GPES being unable to provide the planned number and range of data extracts.”

The NHS Information Centre contracted with Atos to develop a tool to manage data extraction. In March 2013, the Centre accepted delivery of this system from Atos.

But officials at the HSCIC who took over the system on 1 April 2013 found that it had fundamental design flaws and did not work. “The system test did not reflect the complexity of a ‘real life’ data extract and was not comprehensive enough to identify these problems”.

To work in a ‘real life’ situation, the GPES query system needed to communicate accurately with the four separate extraction systems and other systems relying on its data. The test officials and Atos agreed was less complex. It did not examine extractions from multiple extraction systems at once.

Nor did the test assess the complete process of extracting and then passing GPES data to third-party systems.

Fixed price and agile – a bad combination

Officials began procuring the GPES query tool in April 2009, using a fixed-price contractual model with ‘agile’ parts. The supplier and officials would agree some of the detailed needs in workshops, after they signed the contract.

But the NAO says there was already evidence in central government at this time that the contractual approach – combining agile with a fixed price – was high risk.

The NAO’s report “Shared Services in the Research Councils”reviewed how research councils had created a shared service centre, where a similarly structured IT contract failed.

In the report, Fujitsu and the shared service centre told the NAO that: “the fixed-rate contract awarded by the project proved to be unsuitable when the customers’ requirements were still unclear.”

The court case of De Beers vs. Atos Origin highlighted a similar failure.

To make matters worse officials relied too heavily on contractors for development and procurement expertise. And 10 project managers were responsible for GPES between 2008 and 2013.

Once health officials and Atos had signed the query tool contract, they found it difficult to agree the detailed requirements. This delayed development, with Atos needing to start development work while some requirements had yet to be agreed. Officials and Atos agreed to remove some minor components. Others were built but never used by HSCIC.

A Department of Health Gateway 4 review in December 2012 found that difficulties with deciding requirements were possibly exacerbated by development being offshore.

They raised concerns about the project management approach:

“The GPET-Q [query tool] delivery is being project managed using a traditional ‘waterfall’ methodology. Given the degree of bespoke development required and the difficulties with translation of requirements during the elaboration parts of R1, the Review Team considers that, with hindsight, it might have been beneficial to have adopted an Agile Project Management approach instead.”

General Practice Extraction Service – an investigation. NAO report.

Latest healthcare IT disaster is a reminder of how vital government digital transformation is.

Beyond the Universal Credit headlines: what IDS doesn’t say

Posted on 16/02/2015 | 4 comments

By Tony Collins

The “good news” headlines over the weekend suggest that Universal Credit is finally rolling out nationally, the implementation problems having been ironed out.

But do senior officials at the Department for Work and Pensions know themselves whether the IT will ever work at scale, handling millions of UC claims?

The national roll out begins today (16 February 2015) says a brochure on the success of the programme “Universal Credit at Work – Spring 2015“. It’s issued by the Department for Work and Pensions and has a foreword signed by Iain Duncan Smith and his welfare minister Lord Freud.

“Throughout the report, robust evidence shows that Universal Credit is working,” says the brochure, which adds:

“Over the last four months, the roll-out of Universal Credit has continued and from 16 February, it will be available to:
• single claimants in 112 jobcentres
• couples without children in 96 jobcentres
• families in 32 jobcentres
• all claimant types in a limited postcode area in London (Sutton) to test the enhanced Digital Service.”

Ahead of national roll out, DWP officials have been briefing the media on the success of the UC programme. Hence the headlines yesterday.

BBC Online’s headline: Universal Credit roll-out £600m under budget”

Even the Guardian was positive. The reinvention of Iain Duncan Smith – is he the man to save the Tories?

The Sunday Times declared that Universal Credit “will be operating in every jobcentre across the country by this time next year if the Conservatives remain in power, Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, has vowed”.

The Telegraph’s headline was supportive of IDS: Coalition’s welfare shake-up is working

When Andrew Marr asked IDS about Universal Credit’s IT, IDS suggested that the computer systems to handle complicated claims are already in place.

Marr: “This roll-out across the country is only for single claimants, not for families, so it’s nothing like universal at this point. Do you think you have a computer system able to cope with much more complicated claims?

IDS: “Yes we have. In fact we rolled it out first in the North West where we rolled it out to singles, to couples and to families so it is now complete pretty much across the North West …

“What we are doing now is exactly what we did in the North West – roll it out stage-by-stage, so singles first, to every jobcentre by early Spring next year, and then you’ll do couples and then you’ll do families.

“And then you’ll do the final development which is digital which will allow much more things like apps on your phone.”

The reality

Is the UC programme really on track for a national roll-out? Are the concerns of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee about the slow and troubled UC programme unfounded?

The reality can be gleaned from the DWP’s plans for the roll-out, as inspected by the National Audit Office, and by documents on the gov.uk website on who is entitled – or rather who is not entitled – to claim UC during the roll-out.

It’s true that UC is being gradually extended from single claimants to couples and families, but the DWP has issued such a long list of exemptions on eligibility that numbers of claimants will continue to be tiny at least until the middle of this year (election time).

The small number of claimants will allow the DWP to continue handling more complicated claims using, in part, manual processes. This means that a fully-automated UC system to calculate benefits need not be in place for the time being.

The small number of claimants also means that the risk of implementation problems coming to public attention in the next few months is minimal.

In two days time – Wednesday 18 February 2015 – gov.uk is due to reveal the latest figures on UC take-up. As of today, the latest figures available show the total number of successful UC claimants at 30, 850 on 11 December 2014 – whereas the system needs to be able to cope with around 7-8 million claimants.

Comment

It’s good news that UC is rolling out nationally and that it’s being gradually extended to couples and families as well as single people. But the IT has not been tested properly because the numbers of eligible claimants is so small. The DWP has narrowed the band of eligibility for UC by a long list of exemptions.

You cannot claim, as a single person or a couple, if, say, you receive Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payment. You cannot claim if you own, or partly own, your home, or are homeless, or in supported or temporary accommodation. Many other exclusions apply.

The result is that nobody knows yet whether the main UC IT systems, and its dependent business processes and systems, will work at scale. Shouldn’t the DWP come clean on the technical and business change challenges it still faces?

UC will not be an economic proposition on the basis of the partly automated processes that exist at present. It’s possible, though, that the cheap-to-build digital systems – which are on trial in Sutton, South London – will work and will eventually take over from the mixture of legacy, new and manual systems and processes that are now in place. Nobody knows whether they will work at scale.

The reality is that the UC programme, despite years of IT coding and a spend of hundreds of millions of pounds, is still at an early stage of development. It could be at an early stage of development for several more years, even though the positive headlines at the weekend give a different impression.

It may also be worth mentioning that the UC programme has yet to gain Treasury approval for the full business case – or indeed the outline business case. There is therefore no Treasury approval for the scheme long-term funding. There are still questions to be answered over its economic feasibility.

None of this has been said by the DWP or IDS. We’ll have to wait for another National Audit Office update to know the facts.

Thank you to Dave Orr for his emails to me on Universal Credit

4 Comments

Posted in Accenture, BT, Campaign4Change, Government IT, HP, IBM, Universal Credit

Tagged Cabinet Office, Efficiency and Reform Group, Francis Maude, SME government contracts

HMRC seeks smaller IT contracts – a big risk, but worth taking?

Posted on 27/01/2015 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Public Accounts Committee MPs today criticise HM Revenue and Customs for not preparing well or quickly enough for a planned switch from one main long-term IT contract to a new model of many short-duration contracts with multiple suppliers.

It’s a big and risky change in IT strategy for HMRC that could put the safe collection of the nation’s taxes at risk, say the MPs in a report “Managing and replacing the Aspire contract”.

But the Committee doesn’t much consider the benefits of switching from one large contract to smaller ones, potentially with SMEs.

Is the risk of breaking up the huge “Aspire” contract with Capgemini, and its subcontractors Fujitsu and Accenture, worth taking?

Suppliers “outmanoeuvre” HMRC

The PAC’s report makes some important points. It says that HMRC has been “outmanoeuvred by suppliers at key moments in the Aspire contract, hindering its ability to get long term value for money”.

The costs of the Aspire deal have soared, in part because of extra work. Before it merged with Customs and Excise, Inland Revenue spent about £200m a year on its IT outsourcing contract with EDS, now HP. Customs and Excise’s contract with Fujitsu cost about £100m a year.

After the Revenue and Customs merged, and a new deal was signed with Capgemini, the money spent on IT services soared to about £800m a year – arguably out of control.

HM Revenue and Customs spent £7.9bn on the Aspire contract from July 2004 to March 2014, giving a combined profit to Capgemini and Fujitsu of £1.2bn, equal to 16% of the contract value paid to these suppliers.

HMRC considers the contract to have been expensive, and pressure to find cost savings in the short-term led it to trade away important value for money controls, says the PAC report.

“For example, in a series of disastrous concessions, HMRC conceded its rights to withdraw activities from Aspire, to benchmark the contract prices against the market to determine whether they were reasonable,” says the report.

“It also gave up its right to share in any excess profits. In 2007, HMRC negotiated a three-year extension to the Aspire contract just three years after the contract was let, extending the end of the contract from 2014 to 2017.

“The Department has still not renegotiated the terms of the contract in line with a memorandum of agreement it signed in 2012 designed to separate Capgemini’s role in service provision from its role as service integrator and introduce more competition.”

Big or small IT suppliers?

The Aspire contract between HMRC and Capgemini is the government’s largest
technology contract. It accounts for for 84% of HMRC’s total spend on ICT.

Today’s report says that Aspire has delivered certainty and continuity over the past decade but HMRC now plans a change in IT strategy in line with the Cabinet Office’s plan to break up monopolistic contracts.

In 2010, the Cabinet Office announced that long-term contracts with one main supplier do not deliver optimal levels of innovation, value for money or pace of change.

In 2014, it announced new rules to limit the value, length and structure of ICT contracts. No contract should exceed £100m and no single supplier should provide both services and systems integration to the same area of government. Existing contracts should not be extended without a compelling case.

The Cabinet Office says that smaller contracts should allow many more companies to bid, including SMEs, and provide an increase in competition.

HMRC agrees. So it doesn’t plan to appoint a single main supplier when Aspire expires in 2017. But PAC members are worried that the switch to smaller contracts could jeopardize the collection of taxes. Says the PAC report:

“HMRC has made little progress in defining its needs and has still not presented a business case to government. Once funding is agreed, it will have only two years to recruit the skills and procure the services it will need.

“Moreover, HMRC’s record in managing the Aspire contract and other IT contractors gives us little confidence that HMRC can successfully achieve this transition or that it can manage the proposed model effectively to maximise value for money.

“HMRC also demonstrates little appreciation of the scale of the challenge it faces or the substantial risks to tax collection if the transition fails. Failure to collect taxes efficiently would create havoc with the public finances.”

The PAC recommends that HMRC “move quickly to develop a coherent business case, setting out the commercial and operational model it intends to put in place to replace the Aspire contract. This should include a robust transition plan and budget”.

Richard Bacon, a long-standing member of the PAC, said HMRC has yet to produce a detailed business case for the change in IT strategy.

“HMRC faces an enormous challenge in moving to a new contracting model by 2017, with many short-duration contracts with multiple suppliers, and appears complacent given the scale of the transformation required.

“Moreover, HMRC’s record in managing IT contractors gives us little confidence that HMRC can successfully achieve this transition or that it can manage the proposed model effectively to maximise value for money.”

Comment

The PAC has a duty to express its concerns. HMRC needs stable and proven systems to do its main job of collecting taxes. A switch from a single, safe contract with a big supplier to multiple, smaller contracts could be destablizing.

But it needn’t be. The Department for Work and Pensions is making huge IT – and organisational – changes in bringing in Universal Credit. That is a high-risk programme. And at one time it was badly managed, according to the National Audit Office. But the gradual introduction of new systems hasn’t hit the stability of payments to existing DWP claimants.

This is, perhaps, because the DWP is doing 4 things at once: running existing benefit systems, building something entirely new (the so-called digital service), introducing hybrid legacy/new systems to pay some new claimants Universal Credit, and is asking its staff to do some things manually to calculate UC payments. Expensive – but safe.

The DWP’s mostly vulnerable claimants should continue to be paid whatever happens with the new IT. So the risks of major change within the department are financial. The DWP has written off tens of millions of pounds on the UC programme so far, says the NAO. Many more tens of millions may yet be wasted.

But many regard the risks as worth taking to simplify the benefits system. It could work out a lot cheaper in the end.

At HMRC the potential benefits of a major change in IT strategy are enormous too. Billions more than expected has already been spent on having one main supplier tied into the long-term Aspire contract (13 years). Isn’t it worth spending a few tens of millions extra running parallel processes and systems during the transition from Aspire to smaller multiple contracts?

It could end up costing much less in the end. And running parallel new and existing systems and processes should ensure the safe collection of taxes.

If government departments are not prepared to take risks they’ll never change – and monolithic contracts and out-of-control costs will continue. Is there anything more risky than for HMRC to stay as it is, locked into Aspire, or a similar long-term commitment?

HMRC not ready to replace £10bn Aspire contract, MPs warn – Computerworld

Taxpayers face havoc from HMRC computer changes – Telegraph

3 Comments

Posted in Accenture, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, change management, consultants, cost reduction, DWP, Fujitsu, Government IT, HMRC, HP, IT projects, Legacy ICT, Major Projects Authority, National Audit Office, risk, Universal Credit

Tagged Cabinet Office, Capgemini, Efficiency and Reform Group, procurement, Public Accounts Committee, SME government contracts

Of mice and IT elephants – guest blog

Posted on 04/02/2014 | 4 comments

By John Pearce

I heard your interview on BBC’s World at One today Tony. You were saying there may be potential for fleet-of-foot small IT firms to access government contracts. It was music to my ears.

You referred to the NHS and Universal Credit IT disasters and the way contracting has been dominated by a few big beasts and multi-nationals. You killed the myth that “big is beautiful” and praised “new rules” to break up projects into smaller units.

Small can be perfectly formed and powerful. Businesses like ours are quick-reflex mice stuck behind the elephants blocking the doors. Why don’t they just sit out of the way, in the room, like other elephants?

We are an SME in IT. We have great pedigree, an innovative product, a presence in education and are ready to break into the business world and government work more generally. But without the bulk and buying power to advertise, lobby and bid for the current huge projects we have not been able to do much, if anything. We are encountering elephant in the door syndrome.

So we continue doing what we do, scurrying like mad, working unreasonable but happily given hours. It is not in the country’s interest for us to be tired, blocked and trapped. We fear being swallowed up, of losing our identity. I suppose it might be quicker than being slowly squashed under an elephant’s backside.

iAbacus

Dan O’Brien, my business partner, is young, creative, dynamic and rushed off his feet. I am three of those and old. He has run a small successful software company for 15 years. I had a successful senior career in education and in business as consultant, evaluator, writer and publisher. I created a deceptively simple, improvement model for individual, team and organisation. So, Dan and I created an on-line version.

We launched “The iAbacus” in 2012 and were finalists in the BETT2014Awards [hosted by Jo Brand] on 22 January 2014. There were lots of mice competing with us and the usual elephants. But before we announce the winner let’s have a look at the iAbacus focusing on school governance.

We dream of developing this and moving into business generally. We see a huge potential for this “empowering personnel” approach applied to NHS and civil service personnel. Up to now the elephants have blocked the way, or grinned through the windows while they ate ice buns. Can elephants grin?

We didn’t win the Bett2014 Big Cheese but it was a great show – it makes people like us feel good. Yes, coming back to the office was disappointing but we are nibbling away, on-line, working in education but, even in this field I know so well, customers can be sniffy too – “small is ugly and simple is simplistic; let’s go for the big suppliers”.

New rules

Will the Cabinet Office’s new rules work?

Not unless there is support for small outfits like ours who, intent on the day to day business, will struggle writing the bids and attending the selections. We’ll keep running and swerving around elephant bottoms but we need muscle power and finance for the advertising and lobbying. We need to elbow past the elephants, get an audience with buyers. Is there anyone out there? Echo…echo….echo…

Or, are there friendly elephants out there who could help us, encourage and include us? Could the regulations persuade them? How about a clause like the one when planning new houses? Every housing project has to include a percentage of affordable homes. How about every IT contract having to include a percentage of SMEs?

I want to one of them. I want to be a Trojan Mouse!

John Pearce is a freelance consultant, working across education, business and community. After a successful career in teaching and headship, he became Deputy Chief Inspector for Nottinghamshire County Council. He was a BETT2014 finalist for The iAbacus which he created with Dan O’Brien.

john@iabacus.co.uk dan@iabacus.co.uk

BBC’s World at One focus on government IT.

4 Comments

Posted in Campaign4Change, Government IT, SME

Tagged Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, public sector, public services, SME government contracts

	Tony Cooke on Most of the underlying causes…
	New compensation for… on Post Office reveals estimates…
	New compensation for… on Post Office reveals estimates…
	incealisonhotmailcom on We know how the Post Office IT…
	John Huron on Why does truth on Universal Cr…

Tag Archives: SME government contracts

Central buying of IT and other services is a bit of a shambles – just what Sir Humphrey wants?

Capita share price falls to new 10-year low as it lowers profit forecast

Atos pleased after it’s cleared of “sharp practice”

Beyond the Universal Credit headlines: what IDS doesn’t say

HMRC seeks smaller IT contracts – a big risk, but worth taking?

Of mice and IT elephants – guest blog

By David Bicknell and Tony Collins

Posts by email

Search Campaign4Change

Blogroll

White papers and links

See us on Facebook

Campaign4Change

Subscribe

Top Posts & Pages

Recent comments

Tony Collins

David Bicknell

Follow me on Twitter

Tag Archives: SME government contracts

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

By David Bicknell and Tony Collins

Posts by email

Search Campaign4Change

Blogroll

White papers and links

Campaign4Change

Subscribe

Top Posts & Pages

Recent comments