UK courts' £1.3B case management platform hit with failures The UK courts service failed to see the benefits of a £1.3 billion ($1.56 billion) case management platform after a rethink led to a £22.5 million ($27 million) write-off, says a government watchdog. Originating in 2016, the effort to modernize His Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) only "partly evaluated" one early …
The article reads like a cut and paste of the mistakes made on so may previous HMG IT procurements. Not checking the requirements, cost overruns, going for the most ambitious system, deciding to integrate another existing system using an 'interface'. Honestly I've read pretty much all of this on the Register before, for years. Do these people NEVER LEARN?????
Let me guess, were perchance none of the senior team IT professionals? Did they leave the tedious 'details' to their minions?
Speechless.
The only way to fix this is to start looking properly at who gains from this, irrespective of the failure.
We've indeed been here before. Repeatedly.
Here are a few fun conditions to get started:
1: Any consultancy that has been involved in developing the requirements should not be allowed to bill for changes later. Yes, you'll need some conditionals there, but this is very often the massive overbilling backdoor that is implemented from the start, and not by accident.
2: No former management of any organisation involved in the construction/creation of any project shall have a controlling position in the NAO when it does its audits. If a former partner of a company is in charge of the NAO when an audit happens I think it's fair to assume that audit will result in an all clear..
So there.
Having spent a lot of the first half of my career hanging around courts waiting to be called as a witness and then told to go away and come back tomorrow - or next week - I'm not surprised. What made it worse was that quite a lot of the time the evidence was quite formal & could have been taken as read from my original witness statements.
The courts are a textbook case of why you shouldn't go straight to computerising the process when it's the process itself that needs sorting out.
One of the core issues is that the lawyers* may be concerned in multiple cases and that if one case overruns it affects their availability for others. Even judges are not immune to this as they may have to preside over an urgent hearing.
Add to that that it might not be predictable how long a witness's examination and cross-examination This obviously affects the overall length of the case but by pushing a hearing over into another day it can lead to conflicts with counsels' or witnesses' commitments to other courts. (I've seen this exploited by a prosecutor stringing out one day's proceedings to hold back another witness's testimony because he knew the leading defence barrister was due in court and that the junior would be too timid to cross-examine that witness.)
*And also various expert witnesses.
"Having spent a lot of the first half of my career hanging around courts waiting to be called as" aN EXPERT "witness".
When I was an Expert Witness I charged by time, just like lawyers and counsel.
" & could have been taken as read from my original witness statements." Which would have been disputed by other "experts", therefore the system was introduced that experts should agree as much as possible before any hearings.
The problem, was, and still is, that certain "experts blatantly lie and certain lawyers (and those ultimately footing bills) encourage this but I only know of a single case where a lawyer was tasked about this - no punishment, and no "expert" witness caught lying has ever been banned. A favourite when caught was "Oh, you have me there"
So thge problem is dishonesty all round.
In my case it was covered by salary and, like the police witnesses, I doubt the cost was charged to the prosecution, courts or anyone else. If that had happened it might have encouraged more effective use of time but I doubt it.
As to taking written statements a colleague who had come from working in a different lab said that in her area that happened much more frequently than ours - and it was quite rare to encounter a defence expert in ours.
But one of my statements concerned a partial identification of one of three women's' bodies from La Mon House burned beyond recognition. Circumstance had preserve a small amount of head hair and my statement was confined to saying that, on the basis of comparison with samples from the hair brushes of the three women known to have died, that it could have been that one and couldn't have been either of the other two. The main consequence was that one of the families had the assurance that they had the right mother's body to bury and yet I spent ages hanging about to make that brief statement in person in the several separate trials that took place. That was an extreme example which sticks in my mind after all these years but there were many others which were less so.
I've been involved in huge procurements for years and the flaw, which almost always leads to penalty costs, delays etc is the fixation towards cost at the outset.
Finance is almost always around 50% of any score, so the cheapest quote immediately has a HUGE lead regardless of actually more important factors long term like usability, how fit for purpose it is, capacity expansion, flexibility, security, governance etc.
You can and generally do end up with a product costing more than most of the others would have as the specification needs to be changed to include functionality already available in the other "expensive" alternatives but that brings with it instability and massive delayed and additional off-spec costs.
I wonder which of the big consultancies was responsible for this?
The incessant need of government to involve these morons like Accenshite, while at the same time getting rid of internal expertise is mind boggling. Instead of having people who know how the department works and what is actually needed, you get graduates charged out at £1500/day taking a hammer to your environment and trying to get each government organisation working according to their particular number of useless checkboxes.
The annoying thing is you'll get another consultancy brought in to fix the problems created by the 1st one, but what will actually happen is that they'll repeat the same mistakes while what is left of the internal staff end up doing all the actual work.
Anonymous because obviously I prefer the cheap suited morons to find out what I think of them when I decline all their meeting requests and make their staff cry
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