Another GDS cockup: Rural Payments Agency cans £154m IT system The Rural Payments Agency has frozen part of its new "digital" £154m Common Agricultural Payments IT system to provide EU subsidies to farmers and told them to go back to pen and paper. The system was intended to allow farmers to confirm their fields were correctly allocated, using an online interface for the first time. The …
"El Reg understands that the Government Digital Service was responsible for throwing out a small number of suppliers working on RPA instead and went for a 40-plus suppliers approach"
What could possibly go wrong with that approach?...
And 40 suppliers would make a ground-breaking improvement to the front-end, how?
Years ago, I heard about two similar farmers payment systems. One was written by an in-house team, and another was written, I believe, by a large outside company.
The in-house developed system was easier to use, quicker, had more features, made fewer errors, cost less to run and paid farmers promptly. The other system was slow & buggy. A payment backlog of six months was considered good.
On the subject of 'two systems doing the same thing'... a company I worked for acquired two companies with systems doing more or less the same thing. Reputedly the decision on which to can was based on 'which has the fewest open bugs in its bug tracking system' (that was the sort of British management at its finest we came to know and love). So they canned one. Then it turned that the other had written their own bug tracking system which was buggy and actually it had had more bugs.
Let me guess. The in-house GDS system worked up to a point. A certain big company with offices in Victoria Street and Reading and an infamous history for charging £23m for a single 'Site under construction' page then came along, told them that the site was rubbish and that they could do it better, charged £154m and to cap it all (geddit?) failed to deliver.
Perish the thought that they might actually have to hand back the money ...
> A payment backlog of six months was considered good.
when it comes to agricultural payments, 6 months is amazingly good. You tend to think in terms of 18 months to two years or three if Margaret Beckett is in charge. Unless you're not a farmer but an "agribusiness" - then you get your money pretty quickly. The UK Government loves giving money to rich people.
The question is how agile was it? Very, apparently. So agile you can do it on paper.
YAY! GO GDS!
More seriously, when will someone stop all of this nonsense? This stuff actually matters. It's not lastminute.com trying a new feature on a website. It's just not the same.
And this multi-supplier stuff is dreadful to manage commercially. Who is actually now responsible for this failure? I suspect no-one can actually be sued.
So any chance we can take the real lessons stop this crap before we do the same to HMRC and destroy our nation's ability to collect tax?
Why would I not be surprised that some where there are a bunch of Project and Programme managers, slapping themselves on the back, congratulating each other on a job well done because the project delivered on time and in budget. The fact that it doesn't work is immaterial.
Most major projects delivery crap because their PM's couldn't tell their arse's from their elbows and as a discipline it seems to appeals to those who seem to think that PM is a good way to get into real management, therefore they think budget and timescale are the only requirement for delivering a system. A lot of outsourcing orgs are infested by these parasites.
If you find a good PM who understands that solution quality is important as cost and time, and has the balls to explain this to the stakeholders, Pay them a good salary and hang onto them as long as possible.
...whether it's GDS or the Rural Payments Agency here, after all we've been here before with deja vu all over again
in response to the NAO criticisms the then head of the RPA procuded one of the best non-statements I've seen:
"We will be considering the content of the report carefully. The problems we have faced over the last year have been widely documented. We are striving to make payments as quickly as possible and apologise to those farmers still awaiting money."
I can't track it down at the moment but at a Select Committee hearing, the then recently appointed head of DEFRA said (my phrasing) "the thing is, it started before I arrived" and the then recently left head of DEFRA said "the thing is, it happened after I left"
The naked RPA staff seem to be in there, somewhere, too
Over the next 40-something days UK-based readers of El Reg will have an opportunity to engage with prospective parliamentary candidates of many and varied parties. Might this be an opportunity to ask our prospective representatives in Parliament and for some, government, how they view the future of government IT services (including the apparent abomination which is the present Coalition's GDS) ?
I know this is dangerously radical and Political for El Reg's core readership but the present farcical situation reflects upon all professional IT practitioners working in the UK. If we fail to engage with the process, how can we later express our shock and horror when things like this RPA fiasco occur time and time again.
Disclaimer: Not a member of any political party, but own up to having voted in 2010 for one of the members of the present coalition, and undecided regarding the 2015 election.
All this started 1991-92 when EU subsidy for food production switched from the produce to the land. At least it stopped the Food Mountains. The particular problem that we had in the UK was that, with farm land not taxed, there was no easily-usable central record of owners and occupiers of land. The Ordnance Survey had maps showing field sizes, but they were not always current. The Land Registry isn't complete for England. And the payment went to the occupier.
Add to that the way that MAFF ignored its advisers and required an insane level of precision in the measurement of field sizes. In a typical British arable field, the permitted error in measuring the cultivated area worked out as less than a foot, while the OS area was apparently based on the assumption of Euclidean geometry. If part of a field was setaside land, you couldn't use the OS area, and woe betide you if your measurement of the total area was larger than the claim of the year before.
At least it was a paper-based system then. And MAFF had local offices. many of which have now vanished.
Eventually, MAFF became DEFRA. The last time I went to the county agricultural show. the prime locations were occupied by supermarket chains instead of grain merchants. There were more horses than cows on the site. I remember some company that installed computer networks in offices, while a long-established machinery dealer, who my grandfather had dealt with, had gone bust over the winter.
We already had robots milking cows. We have GPS on the combine harvesters, plotting the grain yelds across the fields, and showing the places where fertiliser would be wasted.
There's a history of farmers using the high-tech tools, and overcoming the problems of computers trying to exchange information. Nitrate pollution? If it gets into the water, it's money wasted.
Those are the people who struggle with the systems the government pays for. Don't believe the image of country folk you see on TV. The incompetents are working for the government (and offering to help you).
"However, the system is not officially fully live – under the GDS “digital by default service standard”, the system is still in beta test phase" according to Computer Weekly
What the f**k? You're telling me that the system running the payments to farmers is actually hasn't come out of test???
Perhaps they shoud take this opportunity to stop giving taxpayers money to farmers and give it to those who actually need it instead. Here in East Anglia, arable farming is incredibly lucrative, with record yields every year and continuing very high grain prices.
Sadly, farming also contributes almost nothing to the local economy by way of jobs as so much of the work is mechanised.
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Having managed many programme recoveries in the UK and around the world it is obvious to me that each generation cannot learn from past experience and will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately Darwinan principles do not seem to operate in the commissioning and delivery of large projects and programmes despite attempts by the so-called keepers of professional standards. The good news is that for people with a strong stomach and inclination there is a well paid career in cleaning up the mess.
She'll be able to ridicule whoever she's decided is "guilty" of this fiasco.
And no doubt, like the recent HSBC grilling, she'll be demanding that responsibility belongs at the top of the organisation. So which minister will lose his job? Err, that would be no one.
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