How mega city council's failure to act on Oracle rollout crashed its financial controls "Huge. There could be major problems transacting leading to late payment or collection of debt. The accounts could be wrong." Anyone reading such a statement about the impacts of a vital computer system going live might think twice before pressing the button. The problem for Europe's largest local authority is that the right …
I think there is another wider factor in this horror show debacle and that is the size of Birmingham City Council which has a population of 1,158,000 or thereabouts. That results in a huge, sclerotic and disfunctional bureaucracy so I would like to see that council broken up into two or three smaller and more responsive unitary authorities.
You're not the only one, but that's very much counter to the direction of travel of this Government, who are mad keen on merging smaller authorities together into monolithic super-/unitary authorities. Smaller, more accountable local-level services are anathema to them - and yes, I acknowledge the counter-argument that merging services reduces duplication and creates economies of scale (even if I don't necessarily agree with it).
>” Smaller, more accountable local-level services are anathema to them - and yes, I acknowledge the counter-argument that merging services reduces duplication and creates economies of scale”
But you can have local accountability and economies of scale, just get rid of the PFI and privatisation garbage and the blocks on public organisations working together.
In my area the neighbouring county councils have a shared “in house” back office ie. It is not a private business with three PFI contracts and those who work there are council employees. The only real overhead I have is: always get a purchase order and ensure it is referenced especially on an invoice you wish to paid. However, the benefit is the invoice is paid within 30 days.
We've had that one before.
How would you actually break Birmingham City Council into 'two or three' smaller authorities? Get a map and have a look. Pizza slice approach? Concentric rings? Clusters of wards?
Then you would need to implement two or three systems similar to the one which is not fully functional now. Who would you get those from? Who would project manage the introduction of those systems while maintaining continuity? Then you would have duplicated or triplicated org charts plus the transitional processes around dividing up the existing contracts, workforce &c. Not to mention procurement of buildings &c in the new boroughs (the City having sold off as many buildings as possible in line with the previous national government's policy).
It could be done, but it is a 10 to 15 year project with a lot of disruption, significant extra costs, and no benefit to the provision of services that I can see. Remember the GLC abolishment occurred with London boroughs already in place for basics.
(Icon: we need youth services back urgently).
I was reading the Grenfell response from Angela Rayner yesterday picked up this in the wider article.
“In a written statement published on Wednesday, the Cabinet Office parliamentary secretary, Georgia Gould, said the firms would be investigated under debarment powers in the Procurement Act 2023, which came into effect on Monday. “These investigations will establish whether the organisations have engaged in professional misconduct for the purposes of that act,” she said.
I look forward to Oracle, Crapita, Sopa Steria, Fujitsu, IBM and many others etc all being subject to debarment from Public Sector contracts under these new powers.
Birmingham CC Oracle Fusion seems an ideal IT test case….
Georgia Gould was head of Camden Council at the time of Grenfell.
Camden initially said they had no blocks with similar cladding, but then had to do a reverse ferret when it turned out they had 4 or 5 blocks in the Swiss Cottage area with that cladding... and it had been installed without firebreaks, meaning it created a chimney effect that would aid any fire... oh, and add in things like missing/broken fire doors, broken alarms, no sprinklers...
She ordered the blocks to be immediately evacuated, putting hundreds of families up at the local sports centre or in hotels for weeks, unable to return except for brief visits accompanied by a 'fire warden'
(nerd angle... Col Foster of Shado supposedly live in one of the blocks)
It sounds like a classic public sector issue of a committee being held accountable.
I don't believe a committee can ever be held accountable: No organisation will ever fire an entire committee if it screws up.
Committees can provide oversight and express opinions, but they can not own a decision.
At most the chair of a committee can be held accountable. But that's not likely to ever happen.
The questions that spring to my mind are:
What were the 'Steering Committee' reading?
Why did the Steering Committee not read, or understand, the report rating the system at 'red'?
I was going to say that, unlike the Post Office's infamous 'Project Horizon', at least no one would be falsely accused of theft, false accounting and go to prison / commit suicide because of this failure, but as a major council, failures will have prevented funds going to essential services, and. frankly, people will have died because of this mess.
In my experience Steering Committees are filled with ‘important people’ based on rank rather than skill or knowledge. They are entirely reliant on others telling them what to do decide.Thus the ‘traffic light” systems so commonly used; you need everything translated into a something that a 4 year old can understand and bury the reality in footnotes and reports at the bottom of the pile.
The business case said "The current SAP ERP system expires in its current operational capacity from March 2021."
In what way it was due to expire wasn't stated. End of contract? EoL for H/W or S/W versions? There were two options to retain it but neither were explored in the business case.
They could have upgraded the SAP system - the challenge was that it was heavily customised and already costing £5.1m/year to support in 2021. Part of the reason that the costs are so high is that each year they fail to move to the new Oracle system, they incur another £5+ million for SAP support and licence costs.
Oracle was supposed to cost significantly less (£19m for implementation of an off the shelf system including hardware, customisation and migration and X years operational cost - I can't find the details but I believe it was 5 years - the expectation was significant IT savings over the proposed life of the system at approx £3m/year annual savings).
During the initial implementation, the Councils finance department realised they needed either significant business change or significant Oracle customisations to carry out required functions, I believe around management of services proved to schools. This scope change increased implementation costs from around £2.5m upto £14.5m and added an additional 2 years of implementation meaning £10m in additional SAP costs.
At some point in the implementation Oracle auditing was disabled, I suspect due to performance issues with the increased requirements on the original hardware but the explanation given is that it was a configuration error - likely to avoid delays to system delivery, only for the Oracle system to require significant additional manual checks (250k/month) to avoid fraud and a failure to meet auditing requirements for 2-3 years and thus an additional £5+m annually for continuing SAP support.
While I'm sure my explanation misses some of the nuances of the implementation, the key points are present and decisions were made against a backdrop of financial issues caused by the poor cost control during the commonwealth games (unrelated to Oracle or sap) and a court finding they failed to meet equal pay for decades for minimum wage staff.
The basic auditing in Fusion is intrinsic to how it operates (e.g. accounting via sub leger to gl, who created/updated transactions, approvals history), if you want auditing of every user action (including deletes, changes to config & reporting setup) that needs to be enabled by object type, not complex to do but I would suspect the implementation partners didn't set it up.
I would suspect the auditing issue is from external feeds into fusion and traceability of end to end transactions rather than following it though the sub leger to general ledger. If that is the case then it's more likely integrations didn't log sufficient editing information to reconcile data to source.
It's pretty much like most ERP software, it works and has to cover world wide config options. Too many customer assume it's just insert a CD and run install.exe and away you go. Of course implementation teams often sell their config template like this then find it doesn't work because of intergration with other systems
In 1999 I was an external contractor for a major UK Bank (no names, no pack-drill..) as a tester. As well as Y2K testing, which was fairly easy to do and verify, I worked on a new counter application that was going to released just after Jan 1st 2000.
I found some serious problems with it. These were formally reported. But, the pressure to release the application was such that they released it anyway.
When the problem appeared, as I knew it would, a different team was tasked with fixing it. So, the development and release teams looked like they had (almost) met their timescales and budgets. The fix team had an ongoing budget so it didn't matter quite so much. Talk about smoke and mirrors!
The problem with Birmingham and other councils with similar issues, is the budget is covered by the rate payers and is almost limitless in quantity. Unless and until people actually lose their jobs when they screw up, this situation will continue.
We have to use an Indian site for low-level requirement writing and all testing.
They throw sh1t over the wall (that doesn't conform to any of the training that we provided - including in videos that they can regularly watch) and we reject it. Our upper management and finance used to account for development and rework in separate budgets, and development always looked good - and the managers and finance slapped each other on the back for saving so much money in the development budget by using the India site. We found out fairly recently that the rework budget was being set against our site! Immediately, we spoke to a number of the C suite. Development and rework are now reported in one pot against the India site. The amount of time that we spend reviewing and rejecting their work is reported directly to the big boss and everyone gets to see much truer cost of the India site - i.e. more that it used to be when done 'in-house'.
Just occasionally things can be budgeted properly and with (at least partial) C suite support.
In 1993 I flagged up that a particular (French) contractor could probably not meet their performance guarantees. Now I don't have particularly fluent French but when at a meeting the contractor's body language says that they are lying coupled with much very rapid French (of which I picked up a few words) I was absolutely sure that they were either very nervous or directly lying.
I flagged my concerns up to my line manager (who was also at the meeting) and to the senior project manager in writing and was told that this contractor was the only one who could do the job and in any case, they had just signed a performance guarantee. As a fairly junior cog in the project wheel I was told that we were going with this contractor on cost grounds and that was it.
Once installed it didn't meet the contract performance and a couple of years later and following several visits from the French implementation team a law suit ensued which went in our favour. Nonethelss we were saddled with a system that didn't perform to specification.
"when at a meeting the contractor's body language says that they are lying coupled with"
This is why face to face meetings matter, as long as you actually have the right people at them
It's not such a bad idea to have a psychology-trained staffer at important (as in large financial value) meetings and if other languages are involved, taking along someone who speaks it, but is tasked with saying NOTHING
"Birmingham's Oracle system implementation was rated as "red" before going live, but it did not explain why and how the council's management, officers, and members made such a decision."
Because the senior person whose bright idea this was, or the councillor in charge of Finance, or both, who would suffer great loss of face if it didn't go live, ignored the constructive criticism and technical feedback and told them "you're all just a bunch of whingers, get on with it".
Back in the 1990s the SI I worked for went through many accreditations about quality, project management and development. I proposed we should underwrite our projects, including the premium as a project cost. By self underwriting, on successful completion that cost becomes margin improvement profi and thus the delivery team (down to the individual engineers) get a bonus.
When it's 5 bugs! Worked on a very late, very over budget project doing some testing for the prime contractor. The system was so unstable that I literally could not write the bugs fast enough! After about a week of constant bug logging, I was called into the manager's office. They were really pleased about the work I was doing but the bug numbers were making them (prime contractor) look bad. Instead of logging a bug per problem ,their solution was to roll several problems into one 'bug report'. That way the issue was recorded but their bug numbers were acceptable. I left shortly afterwards.
So the steering committee weren't given the full information?
"Items in this report, not identifiable in the Steering Committee Update, relate to issues across the several modules, for example, testing and user training," the Grant Thornton report says.
"It is not clear how this report was used and there is no evidence of it being discussed in the minutes of the meeting," it adds.
I'd be asking who was the senior PM and who did he/she work for? And then, why this critical information wasn't shared with the steering committee. Want to bet the PM'ing was done by the vendor? :)
Not saying the steering committee are absolved of blame or that the stakeholders weren't applying pressure for the "right" answer, but still, if the information was shared there would be no "I didn't know" defense.
“ poor governance, lack of ownership among senior officers, poor business case design, a failure to stick to the adopt-not-adapt plan, lack of timely engagement with key users, a failure by the design authority to control the solution, combined with key officers facing conflicting priorities regarding adherence to budgets, timelines, and the protection of both the council's and their own reputations.‘
So, Business As Usual then.
Worked on a very large payroll project.
Long story short, I refused to sign off on my testing due to critical unresolved defects.
Marched into to big boss, told to sign.
Refused again.
Just as he was drawing breath to sack me, I resigned and left the room.
Someone else signed off my testing.
In these circumstances, I opt for getting fired, as the evidence (you do keep stuff in brown envelopes) will always support case of constructive dismissal, which HR will want to avoid and so will offer a substantial uplift…
Plus, having principles and being able to evidence can be helpful in getting work…
