What is it with government and IT projects?

One difference between public and private sector* workers is that people working for the government will tend to follow the legal/quality process even if it means spending a long time doing it. In the private sector people will work to deadlines, and identify the parts of the process that they can get away with not doing - until they get found out.

*Private sector workers includes the likes of Serco, Capita personnel who are working on outsourced government contracts.
 
anything I don't mind said:
I think it stems from the nature of public sector itself.
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This. Having dealt with the public sector on various projects over the years (coming from an agency background), they are apocalyptically useless, everything is dragged out, changed, reworked, rethought and put through too many layers of committee because there is no threat of bankruptcy.

I don't think its necessarily a case of the lowest bidder not delivering, its just....the way the public sector is. The change of scope, lack of serious decision making and constant meddling.
 
They don't always go with the cheapest option. They go with the cheapest option from a company they believe will still be about after 5 years or so, based on the fact they are big and have been about a bit.
A start-up may well be able to deliver better than they require for less, but they won't give them a chance, even though the money they award for the work would mean they will definitely be about for some time.
 
anything I don't mind said:
So they spent £12 billion on an IT project when they were already using a web based third party? Where did the £12 billion go to? do you know? were they planning on building a bespoke system or something?
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You're talking about something you know precisely nothing about, and that's without your suggestions for how it could work.

NPfIT was to do with providing core fundamentals which could underpin a central record for patients, which could be contributed to and accessed by your care provider as appropriate, including providing some patient access. It was barely to do with providing specific software to any health providers at all.

It was really a gargantuan undertaking, and aside from a couple of the companies taking the **** (iSoft), the real downfall of it was underestimating the complexity and scale of the programme. It was poorly specified, poorly tendered and poorly managed, then when it started to go wrong consultants were brought in to *save* it, which ballooned the cost and if anything stunted the progress.

The deliverables that did come out of it (the spine and choose & book) are actually good steps forward, they just came with a lot of waste. The other partial one was ePrescribing, which is a real key factor in making healthcare more efficient and most importantly significantly safer, as a functional product ePrescribing forms the basis of the company I work for, we have individual trust contracts that are 10s-100s of millions. You are sadly deluded in your estimation of the figures.
 
covenantuk said:
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....?
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Sounds right up Accenture's street does that!

Abraham said:
You're talking about something you know precisely nothing about, and that's without your suggestions for how it could work.

NPfIT was to do with providing core fundamentals which could underpin a central record for patients, which could be contributed to and accessed by your care provider as appropriate, including providing some patient access. It was barely to do with providing specific software to any health providers at all.

It was really a gargantuan undertaking, and aside from a couple of the companies taking the **** (iSoft), the real downfall of it was underestimating the complexity and scale of the programme. It was poorly specified, poorly tendered and poorly managed, then when it started to go wrong consultants were brought in to *save* it, which ballooned the cost and if anything stunted the progress.

The deliverables that did come out of it (the spine and choose & book) are actually good steps forward, they just came with a lot of waste. The other partial one was ePrescribing, which is a real key factor in making healthcare more efficient and most importantly significantly safer, as a functional product ePrescribing forms the basis of the company I work for, we have individual trust contracts that are 10s-100s of millions. You are sadly deluded in your estimation of the figures.
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Pretty much summed NPFIT up in a nutshell. We're still picking up a lot of the pieces here, luckily we're onboard with TPP as the pilot trust for their acute system and with the recent removal of Accenture PACS from the LSP contract, we're now in a comfy position.

Agree with you on the points regarding the spine, choose and book, and summary care records - they were actually good fallouts of NPFIT

One thing that the likes of Accenture, CSC, iSoft etc need to get out of their head is that employing lots of pretty fresh out of Uni graduates who are thrown on a 5 day Prince 2 course do not equate to an adequate level of project management experience. Half of them haven't got a clue about anything, let alone multi million pound IT projects
 
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Every project that has gone live since I have been working at my current clients has always gone over budget, but thats because of the nature of how our client works and deals with projects and large sums of money. Most large organisations struggle to budget IT projects because of (especially in our environment) things can change so quickly and they always oversee how much companies are going to charge extras.

I won't mention names but it has the same name as a common brown sauce, they quoted me 4 and a half days work to create a database user for me which I can do within 2 minutes as I have access. They charge our client an absolute fortune for simple things as they know they will pay, can't blame them... But 3 projects have overrun in budget and well... I wonder why with certain vendors.
 
It doesn't sound like the case and I'm not trying to justify the £20k for Putty deployment, but on an extreme level to give you a feel for what this could mean in an Enterprise/National Systems context, "putting putty on 4 laptops" could include:

  • Download the software, consider licensing agreements, vendor support.
  • Ensure it fits in with current software policies / customer strategy
  • Ensure it fits in with security policies / security requirements.
  • Check any user audit / log shipping requirements
  • Ensure it meets ease of use / accessibility requirements.
  • Ensure it enters a software / technical register so it can be upgraded when it becomes out of support
  • Ensure it doesn't break/is incompatible with any of the mission critical desktop applications (regression testing) already in place
  • Ensure it works on the target OS / desktop platform for the required user base (desktop and user surveys)
  • Understand the end user requirements (does it need to have pre-defined connection settings to connect to required systems? Does any functionality need to be disabled? Any windows / group policies required to be changed to allow it to run? etc. etc...). If so engineer and package the required settings.
  • Ensure target systems can be accessed from the desktop via Putty (this could include network designs, firewall/switch changes).
  • Consider any authentication / key distribution requireements to connect to remote systems.
  • Package it for automated deployment e.g. SCCM/Radia)
  • Test the package deployment in a pre-production environment
  • Make changed to Directories / Roles & Access controllers to ensure the software reaches the right users/desktops
  • Ensure support groups / helpdesks have awareness of this software for when queries are raised by end users and know how to manage any queries
  • Alter any support + commercial agreements to introduce the new service.
  • Roll-out the software
  • Customer acceptance & sign-off against requirements
  • Transfer the service out of project to a maintenance team

Consider the project management effort to co-ordinate what usually entails several teams & people to perform all these activities across governance, security, engineering and testing staff and suddenly £20k is a drop in the ocean.

This is an extreme view of activities required, but hopefully in the context of this thread illustrates how easy for the general public to be unaware of the amount of effort required to do something that at face value looks really simple; it ususally isn't.

And in this example the customer rarely likes to take the risk to "just install it" when the consequences of doing so can compromise the availability or the security of existing mission critical systems. This is especially relevant to say the NHS where these systems are literally relied on for life and death situations, or in the case on Central Government systems, for delivering payments that people rely to eat on or for collecting millions of pounds worth of revenue every day used to finance the country. Suddenlty "£20K" to do the job properly sounds like a better proposition.
 
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Abraham said:
You're talking about something you know precisely nothing about, and that's without your suggestions for how it could work.

NPfIT was to do with providing core fundamentals which could underpin a central record for patients, which could be contributed to and accessed by your care provider as appropriate, including providing some patient access. It was barely to do with providing specific software to any health providers at all.

It was really a gargantuan undertaking, and aside from a couple of the companies taking the **** (iSoft), the real downfall of it was underestimating the complexity and scale of the programme. It was poorly specified, poorly tendered and poorly managed, then when it started to go wrong consultants were brought in to *save* it, which ballooned the cost and if anything stunted the progress.

The deliverables that did come out of it (the spine and choose & book) are actually good steps forward, they just came with a lot of waste. The other partial one was ePrescribing, which is a real key factor in making healthcare more efficient and most importantly significantly safer, as a functional product ePrescribing forms the basis of the company I work for, we have individual trust contracts that are 10s-100s of millions. You are sadly deluded in your estimation of the figures.
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Of course there are people that will make it more complicated than it needs to be, that is why they managed to waste £12 billion in 8 years. I think there are probably people employed to do exactly that. Take a simple requirements and turn it in to a 8 year £12 billion hole.

From the sounds of things it was exactly what i said, an IT infrastructure/system to store patient records and make them accessible at hospitals. Something a private healthcare has already been doing for many years.

Sure there may have been more projects like eprescribing but no way they needed to spend that much money. I bet if it was truly audited it would uncover massive fraud and corruption. Companies getting 100 millions and doing nothing for it. Then everyone involved just makes up excuses when the whole thing fails.

Of course i was not being serious about doing it all for £100k. I was only being facetious by pointing out that a solution could be found for a relatively insignificant sum. Of course i don't know the true requirements of what they were after but I know enough about IT to know that £12 billion is simply put, fraud.
 
Dj_Jestar said:
It's also pertinent to mention that it is really, really difficult to understand that in such a process.
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Agreed. The tendering process is terrible and seems really one-sided, rather than collaborative, allowing the service provider to suggest new approaches.
 
how many private companies promise the earth when tendering knowing full well that their product wont deliver on everything at the time? then frantically try to shoehorn additional functionality in as updates and patches, causing delays.

it works both ways..I am sure companies take advantage as its a cut throat business
 
anything I don't mind said:
It would be £100k up front and then a monthly payment for the internet connection. Set up a central server, collocate at a datacenter for example with 1gbit link. Then you use existing web based medical records software instead of developing bespoke. The software would be at an additional cost as i have no idea how much they cost i estimate about £30-50k but maybe more. Set up a firewall vpn that can take that many connections. The additional cost would be digitising the old medical records and importing them in to the system, that is not included in the £100k.
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Your naivety is hilarious. The software licenses alone would be far, far more than 100k, before you add in configuration, project management, pilots, testing, education/training ...
 
Open Source != free of licenses (nor costs associated with it). Also when "license fees" are mentioned, it typically means support costs. That doesn't come free no matter what license model you subscribe to.

Riak, as per your link, is certainly not free. See their licensing here: http://basho.com/pricing/. The only one that is not under a commercial license is their "Pro" edition which doesn't support distributed "datacentres" - something I would expect the NHS would require. They also won't be offering their support for free.
 
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