What is it with government and IT projects?

[Josh]

MoD is useless with IT.

Everthing is sub contracted out. From replacing a CD Drive to unplugging and replugging in a power cable on the server stacks, normally with weeks worth of lead time.

£400 per job to move one PC from Office A to Office B - right next door and 3 weeks worth of approval, budgets constraints and booking the contractor to be on site.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Is it a managed service or an implementation project?

It doesn't matter in the eyes of the DWP - what the DWP wants the DWP gets.

I've seen 95% SLA's pushed to 99% (at no extra cost) just because some high up bod in the DWP decided that's what they wanted.

 

[Sudden]

There should be a law that contractors for government should sign a absolute agreement to stay in budget, with penalties for being otherwise.

At least it should keep out the useless companies, even if it would ultimately be more costly, it should be more efficient.

Penalty clauses are illegal (yes this is a sweeping statement; yes it's true; and yes, there are ways around it as long as it is not a true penalty clause and a genuine per-estimation etc. etc.).

In practical terms, if a company is going over-budget, what do you think is cheaper? Paying them a bit more to get it over and done with, or refusing, suing them for breach, and starting all over again?

Agree with some others - you get what you pay for. It needs to be managed right from the beginning and reigns kept on spend much earlier on, so the above option of starting over isn't absurdly expensive.

 

[covenantuk]

In 15 years of experience in government IT, I can state that almost everything stems from lack of expertise by the organization issuing the tender.

- Tenders are often badly written, with aims that are fuzzy and too general
- Organization often fails to predict situations leading to cost escalations and often lacks expertise to write a contract which covers them against this.
- Often unrealistic expectations of backward compatibility.
- Changing requirements after project is launched (this was the MAJOR reason for the £12bn failure of Labour's NPfIT project)
- Contracts awarded by management teams,without consulting in-house IT or independent advisors. Simply put - they believe the lies from the company salesmen.

I've lost count of the number of systems I've seen put in place where the only time in-house IT learns of the contract award is when engineers arrive to implement them. Often the systems ignore basic IT principles because the management awarding the contract didn't know the right questions to ask. We had one software company who wanted an open share on an internet facing server for employees to dump data into for their system to use - I mean, what can possibly go wrong....?

 

[Skeeter]

It doesn't matter in the eyes of the DWP - what the DWP wants the DWP gets.

I've seen 95% SLA's pushed to 99% (at no extra cost) just because some high up bod in the DWP decided that's what they wanted.

It does when were discussing IT implementation projects, and my point was about fixed price and management of change and scope.

SLAs for a managed outsourced service are a totally seperate (although equally borked) kettel of fish

I assume you work for HP and have been screwed by SLAs your team can't meet?

 

[Deleted member 66701]

ANother major issues is that all the good PM's have gone to the private companies, leaving the likes of DWP with poor (or no) PM's and they can't recruit good PM's as the salaries are no longer competetive with the private companies ans the T&C's have also taken a battering.

Recruitement is a major issue in most public sector bodies now. Who wants to go to a public sector employer offering 1% (or no) payrises each year?

 

[scorza]

This blows my mind surely it would make more sense to keep it in the UK not only would we get back some of the money were essentially reinvesting in british buisness.

When you're talking about the size of some of these contracts, there's only about a few companies in the world who would be prepared to take the liabilities on, most of which aren't UK HQ'd.

 

[StriderX]

Surely though government should not be treated as another corporation with the same rule set? (as much as it ire's me)

 

[Deleted member 66701]

It does when were discussing IT implementation projects, and my point was about fixed price and management of change and scope.

SLAs for a managed outsourced service are a totally seperate (although equally borked) kettel of fish

I assume you work for HP and have been screwed by SLAs your team can't meet?

I used to work for HP yes, left in July 2013. Before that it was EDS and before that ITSA, so I've seen the full cycle. Talking to colleagues still there, it's got worse since I left - I think HP are about to lose the contract(s) because they've started to push back a little.

We always met every SLA, no matter what it was set at

 

[Skeeter]

ANother major issues is that all the good PM's have gone to the private companies, leaving the likes of DWP with poor (or no) PM's and they can't recruit good PM's as the salaries are no longer competetive with the private companies ans the T&C's have also taken a battering.

Recruitement is a major issue in most public sector bodies now. Who wants to go to a public sector employer offering 1% (or no) payrises each year?

Hence why IT teams, especially the non technical side, is almost exclusively filled with ex business people (ex clinical in the NHS, ex military in defence, etc). Lifetime public sector employees (I.e. those that have built a tidy pension and don't want to leave) just see IT as the department to hang around in waiting to retire.

I uses to be part of a 12 person Clinical Applications team in the NHS and was the only one with any idea how computers worked. The Projects team was made up of ex nurses and secretaries who had been coached through Prince2 exams just so the IT department could say they had a project team.

 

[Skeeter]

We always met every SLA, no matter what it was set at

Then your bosses were fools for allowing DWP to push SLAs without increasing the fee.

It's a losing battle though, the DWP will ultimately just drop the contract and go somewhere cheaper. The public sector is ultimately measured on cost above performance/delivery for this type of thing (non front line projects and services).

 

[Kronos]

Some very interesting points have been mentioned here, a bit of an eye opener though when you think about it very logical when it comes to companies keeping schtum when it comes to having goalposts moved on one contract as it might jeopardize future work if they rocked the boat.

 

[Tunney]

The biggest problem with IT outsourcing is that you lose all of your own IT expertise. How can you define a project properly if this expertise is lost? How can you determine which is the best bid?

I used to work for a company that got involved with a lot of government contracts and it was a horror show. Anyone with more than a couple of years experience was effectively in the sales department - rolled out to impress clients but never doing any of the actual work. The work was then either dropped on incredibly hard-working but inexperienced graduates and punted off to India. It was a recipe for disaster and regularly was.

 

[platypus]

You know reading this sort of stuff always makes me even angrier at the people who say "I've got nothing to hide". How governments can be trusted with IT projects, and therefore to keep our data secure I don't know.

 

[Judgeneo]

HP have lost other Gov contracts due to general incompetance, so it doesn't surprise me if they lose the DWP too. EDIT: DWP seems to be moving to a more SIAM like model, so HP will certainly lose their current contract, and have to settle for a smaller slice of pie, or lose out completely.

Has anyone got any links to the failed projects they are posting about?

 

[ikillbears]

frankly if you are in charge of a project that fails due to mismanagement (rather than say the company you contracted going bust etc) then and wastes hundreds of millions but sorry you should be fired for incompetence/negligence.

yet in the public sector it seems you just carry on moving up the seniority ladder of promotion.

It's how you get promoted!

 

[memyselfandi]

The biggest problem normally is when the Customer knows a little so wants to make design decisions about things which they really aren't qualified to make decisions on.

Most solution providers should have standard solutions which they have implemented multiple times and are known, standard, stable components. Any bid will likely be made on the assumption that these will be used. Then the Customer decides they want to do something differently, after reading something online that they really don't understand, and at that point things tend to go downhill rapidly ...

(even worse when the bid team agree to these non-standard things and neglect to actually talking to the projects and support areas and thus drop them in it).

 

[Raumarik]

There are plenty of success stories, seen many myself in local government and the NHS, but they aren't newsworthy.

The only issues I tend to see are when clinicans get too involved, involved too late or where staff who know the technical limitations of the infrastructure are ignored.

 

[slinxy]

It's not the government that choices the way that they buy IT services, it's European law.

Belief outline of what has to happen.
- The person wanting the work to be done write a tender which everyone/company has access to.
- People/Companies no matter how big or small and offer a proposal as long as it's in by the set date.
- All prosposals have to be reviewed, and reasons for rejection must be given to the company.
- They must accept the cheapest variable proposal.

It's really down to the person writing the tender, to stop all this they should really write fines within the tender to stop mr one man band applying to do the job and under bidding everyone else.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

The tender process is to stop people getting their "mates" (read: preferred company) to do the work. It must be publicly tendered to be fair trading.

Where the outsourced companies make their money is in ad-hoc T&M which is outside of the contracted work. If anything is so much as a whisker outside of the predetermined scope of work, there are contract penalties and excessive charges that are demanded.

This means that there is actual encouragement for the outsourcing companies to firstly provide a finicky contract, and secondly, do whatever they can to convince the public department to go outside of the contracted work. This can, and often does, include dragging their heels so that the contracted time period expires even though the work hasn't finished, so the public department has to continue paying at their T&M rates.

edit: The effects are also worsened as public contracted work, more so than private, mustn't "fail".