When news broke recently that the government’s flagship Universal Credit project has already wasted £140m of the taxpayers’ money, Computing came into contact with a consultant who has seen first-hand the destructive nature of the Department for Work and Pensions’ IT strategy.
The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that the DWP’s IT strategy is hampered by employees worrying about whether the tabloid press will approve of their actions.
“The first consideration [for employees] is asking what the Daily Mail says
if they hear about it. This is the headline issue, everyone is driven by
worrying whether the Daily Mail will approve it,” he said.
This atmosphere of worry and caution spawned a mantra within the department: “Don’t risk anything, don’t challenge anything and aim for final delivery”.
This attitude impacts on everything the DWP’s IT department does, our source said.
Another project he worked on was the refresh of a significant chunk of infrastructure and software, for which the team handling the project did not determine any business requirements before going forward with their plans.
“Over four years, identical systems had grown up in parallel and the projects committee, which looks after all of this, said ‘we don’t want a fifth or sixth one so let’s consolidate it’. But the team immediately went out to the market, and said they’ll use the four systems as a reference point to build a new one, with the inevitable result that the supplier is just going to reproduce what’s already there,” he said.
Our source believes problems like these stem from the fact that “government is so used to specifying everything down to the last nut, bolt and washer, so they come up with multi-faceted, hundred-page documents on how an end supplier will develop something, and the end supplier sits down and comes up with an amount [of money they want for it]”.
He revealed that DWP lawyers would write up a contract without even consulting the IT people who would be responsible for overseeing it, adding that in his view big suppliers generally hold too much sway over government departments.
To illustrate this he revealed how he was once at a meeting with a supplier that said it was going to charge the DWP a significant amount of money to do a proof of concept (PoC). “I challenged that, and asked what are we getting for that amount of money, and the answer from the suppler was, ‘we’re not sure what we’re going to deliver but we need this amount of money’,” he said.
The DWP gave the supplier what it wanted because it was worried the company would just walk away.
What frustrates him more than anything is that suppliers who fail to deliver what is agreed in their contracts are not given their marching orders. “The government doesn’t fire them. One big supplier has been dropped from the supplier list [Fujitsu], but what has it taken to get there? It has taken tens of billions of [pounds worth of] failed projects, I suspect,” he said.
And while big suppliers are partly to blame, he echoed the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) views that the DWP’s IT projects suffered from “alarmingly weak management”.
“Contracts are entered into that would be thrown out of the boardroom in the private sector. To say that projects are started and funded without a proper vision of requirements would be an understatement. There are no service level agreements in force and there is confusion as to who the real customer is,” he stated.
Perhaps realising that it had an issue with management, the DWP once held a ‘managing projects’ presentation for its team. “The first thing they said was ‘you don’t have to use it’ – why the hell were we sitting there then, that must have cost £100,000,” he said.
The DWP refused to comment on the allegations, but said that it has already taken “comprehensive action” such as strengthening governance, supplier management and financial controls.
It also claimed that it didn’t recognise the PAC’s £140m write-off figure, adding that it expects this to be considerably less.
“The head of Universal Credit, Howard Shiplee, has been clear that there is real potential to use much of the existing IT,” a spokesperson said.
However, the former DWP consultant dismissed any suggestion of the body having a genuine plan, concluding: “All of the fancy mission statements mean absolutely squat.”
@Sooraj_Shah
Computing
This atmosphere of worry and caution spawned a mantra within the department: “Don’t risk anything, don’t challenge anything and aim for final delivery”.
This attitude impacts on everything the DWP’s IT department does, our source said.
Another project he worked on was the refresh of a significant chunk of infrastructure and software, for which the team handling the project did not determine any business requirements before going forward with their plans.
“Over four years, identical systems had grown up in parallel and the projects committee, which looks after all of this, said ‘we don’t want a fifth or sixth one so let’s consolidate it’. But the team immediately went out to the market, and said they’ll use the four systems as a reference point to build a new one, with the inevitable result that the supplier is just going to reproduce what’s already there,” he said.
Our source believes problems like these stem from the fact that “government is so used to specifying everything down to the last nut, bolt and washer, so they come up with multi-faceted, hundred-page documents on how an end supplier will develop something, and the end supplier sits down and comes up with an amount [of money they want for it]”.
He revealed that DWP lawyers would write up a contract without even consulting the IT people who would be responsible for overseeing it, adding that in his view big suppliers generally hold too much sway over government departments.
To illustrate this he revealed how he was once at a meeting with a supplier that said it was going to charge the DWP a significant amount of money to do a proof of concept (PoC). “I challenged that, and asked what are we getting for that amount of money, and the answer from the suppler was, ‘we’re not sure what we’re going to deliver but we need this amount of money’,” he said.
The DWP gave the supplier what it wanted because it was worried the company would just walk away.
What frustrates him more than anything is that suppliers who fail to deliver what is agreed in their contracts are not given their marching orders. “The government doesn’t fire them. One big supplier has been dropped from the supplier list [Fujitsu], but what has it taken to get there? It has taken tens of billions of [pounds worth of] failed projects, I suspect,” he said.
And while big suppliers are partly to blame, he echoed the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) views that the DWP’s IT projects suffered from “alarmingly weak management”.
“Contracts are entered into that would be thrown out of the boardroom in the private sector. To say that projects are started and funded without a proper vision of requirements would be an understatement. There are no service level agreements in force and there is confusion as to who the real customer is,” he stated.
Perhaps realising that it had an issue with management, the DWP once held a ‘managing projects’ presentation for its team. “The first thing they said was ‘you don’t have to use it’ – why the hell were we sitting there then, that must have cost £100,000,” he said.
The DWP refused to comment on the allegations, but said that it has already taken “comprehensive action” such as strengthening governance, supplier management and financial controls.
It also claimed that it didn’t recognise the PAC’s £140m write-off figure, adding that it expects this to be considerably less.
“The head of Universal Credit, Howard Shiplee, has been clear that there is real potential to use much of the existing IT,” a spokesperson said.
However, the former DWP consultant dismissed any suggestion of the body having a genuine plan, concluding: “All of the fancy mission statements mean absolutely squat.”
@Sooraj_Shah
Computing
