cromwell wrote:Hopefully lessons will have been learned for the next go.
I was trying to reply to this from work but the "secure internet" disappeared into the "ether"...
What I was going to say was that this is optimistic to the point of insanity. Where is the benefit in learning any lesson. They don't even need to succeed, nobody will be dismissed for failure, consultancy companies will still be paid, why bother to put the effort into actually trying to make something that not only works but is replicable over the entire NHS????
Earlier in my career I was advised to learn SSADM. It did not strike me that the person who advised me sold services to the government. It was not until my own career in consulting and watching my daughter, the NHS accountant, having to learn SSADM, that I realised what it was.
It stands for System Software Analysis and Design. Those of us not selling services to the government just call it Sadism. Although it would be better entitled Masochism. It took me a long time to realise that SSADM is nothing more than a No Blame tool. When it all falls apart, when it costs billions and does not work, the contractor pulls out the SSADM mandatory documents with the signed off design parameters and every signed off delivery and says "It was not my fault I did exactly what you asked for". The fact that the consultancy was well aware that the people around the table who ordered the system, designed the system and signed off the documents; were not the people who actually use or maintain the system and had no real idea what it needed to do; never seems to percolate through the hide of the Civil Service brain, which is protected by so many layers of useless leather that it has a very comfortable life of ignorance and failure. Why would the consultancy ever want to tip them off? They make billions out of failure.
I have one classic example of this from my brother who worked on the London Parking Ticket Project (the one that takes you to court, fines you and sends the bailiffs round if you don't pay), in the 1980's.
He told me this one. A memo (written note on paper), was sent to the Civil Servant in control of the mainframe operations. It was quickly scribbled and sent to the CS via the internal post (no emails then). The memo said this.
We must shut down and IPL (restart), the mainframe urgently otherwise the currently running processes will crash it. If we don't shut it down now, it will take more than a day to restart it and the entire project team (numbering more than 200 people), will not be able to work.
Later that day a memo returned to the person who had sent it. Every spelling mistake and punctuation mistake was underlined and a note was written below. If you wish me to act on something you will present it correctly.
The mainframe crashed, the restart took nearly two days, the entire project team sat at their desks, read the papers, drank coffee and chatted (or flirted) with each other.
No investigation was done. Nobody was challenged. No sanctions were taken. Apparently it was perfectly normal to cost the Crown 400 man days to teach someone spelling and grammar.
As far as I can determine, very little has changed from that time. Or more projects would come in on time with the feature set that is required by the users, not the management.
I find the terms "Government IT Success" and "Passed by the Management" to be synonymous.
