Replacement IT at 'high risk'. Squeaky bum time for UK tax folk Risky plans by UK taxmen to overhaul their expensive £10bn IT systems with Capgemini – which underpins government's £500bn in annual revenue collection – have been flagged as high risk of failure. In its annual report by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, the body rated the £600m project as amber/red, meaning the …
For the people in charge in Whitehall/Edinburgh/Cardiff any change is seen as a bad thing. They had to be dragged literally kicking and screaming into the 20th Century sometime around 1986 so there is no surprise that there are probably many thousand people working to actively sabotage any new project that will/could save a few billion over its lifetime. After all, they have those gold plated pensions and perrages to protect now don't they.
The 21st Century won't start until 2050 for them.
To be fair the private sector is almost as bad, or worse in some examples! I think the problem in all cases boils down to unrealistic or overly optimistic planning. I've worked for a system integrator in the past and any project where one or more of the following is true will nearly always be more complicated than it first appears:
1) The system/application is used by more than 20 users or more than one department
2) The system/application is used directly by customers
3) The system/application is required to interface with more than two internal systems/applications
4) The project requires the cooperation of two or more third party companies.
"The business" or "the government" would often be put off embarking on a project if the true cost was revealed up front which enforces overly optimistic estimation, or in fact there may be a naive project manager who simply doesn't know how to properly estimate the project (this is worrying common).
The net result is you often end up with one of the following:
1) Massive cost/time over runs (most common)
2) Project being abandoned with lots of money effectively down the drain. Prepare for another attempt in a couple of years when the scars have healed!
3) Project delivered but with so much functionality de-scoped the original business case may not stand up. "Phase 2" then gets mooted but never happens, or a new project to replace the half baked deliverable begins.
This is a big problem for IT to overcome. I think the main causes are the shortage of 1) technical people who can provide proper estimates and 2) managers who ignore those estimates or massage them to make an acceptable business case!
"Here at the treasury we are determined to cut the deficit by getting value for money for the tax payer.
We have found significant savings by implementing a program of windows 3.1.1 and engaging Capita to oversee a major complex projects leading to a projected budget surplus of 0.5 Trillion pounds over the next 5 years. This way, we can keep the future IT improvements where it belongs - in the future."
The T&S (Travel & Subsistence) clampdown is already causing upheaval. Since April 2016, umbrella companies can no longer claim T&S. Experienced contractors will already have their own limited companies, but first-time contractors who just want to test the waters will be unimpressed at what's on offer.
The T&S expenses legislation changes revolve around the IR35 compliance of the contract. If it is outside of IR35, T&S can still be claimed, even through an umbrella. The wording of the relevant clauses is clear, if a little convoluted.
My umbrella company has just judged (again) that my current contract is outside, and have accepted my June expenses claim. Should be paid next week.
If they hadn't, I would be looking for a rate increase for the next contract, because otherwise it seriously affects the viability of taking a contract any distance from home.
I tried running my own company many years ago, and found it easy to annoy HMRC such that the fines made the umbrella option attractive! I'm good at my real job, I'm crap at running a company (and I fundamentally disagree with some of the tax avoidance techniques used by some of my contractor friends).
It's a nice colour, isn't it? Goes well with black or grey.
"...meaning there is a chance the programmes will be delivered at some point..."
Well, there is always hope for delivery. Or deliverance. I'm not a native speaker, so sometimes the subtleties of the English language confuse me.
Suspect the reason why it is still and will remain at amber/red for some years to come, is that HMRC have to keep the IPA informed of project progress and delays, at least once a month. A lower status probably means IPA might get to look at it again in a year or so...
Hence, given the business impact of the project it is probably a good thing.
They were offering Product / Programme Management roles under contract at a £600 - £750 ++ daily rate.
In real salary terms that's £130K -> £150K per annum pre-taxman hit. No wonder why they're in the shit, no real contractor of a Ltd. company would work for such paltry rates when the project is a guaranteed Epic Fail.
Aspire is crawling with contractors. It's the kind of place where contracts just keep going and going and going and going and goin...
I spent about 2 years there and all the freelancers were as-good-as permies, but working 9 months a year for 3 times the money. Great gig if you don't mind, you know, never actually delivering anything.
"Great gig if you don't mind, you know, never actually delivering anything."
@curd
What do they do all day then? Explain in simple words. What is a typical day like for one of these contractors?
(I'm a teacher. My work is simple to explain, I break concepts down into bits, explain them to rooms full of people, check each and every one of them understands most of it, pop some more complex stuff out to stop the one or two clever ones getting bored, re-explain some stuff for the less confident. Then I set and mark some work to check the extent of understanding. Rinse, repeat, then external exams, check results, adjust as needed for next academic year. I get inspected now and again to check the process is OK. Full time teachers in Colleges would have a case load of 200 to 230 students and 24 to 28 hours in class.)
Coat: mine's the one with the interactive whiteboard pen and a rucksack full of marking
Well you've got the obligatory 9am stand up meeting. This will of course run until 1030, because it's actually a sit down round a whiteboard while your project manager drones on about re-aligning plans to the new, completely incompatible requirements that emerged overnight (again), but you know, it's agile at least right?
After that you'll probably pop off to get a coffee, have a chat. Back at your screen for 11 in time to catch up with the twenty-odd emails you've accrued that morning. Hardly any of them relevant to your terms of reference, but they do need sorting!
At which point, well, frankly, it's time for lunch.
If you're very, very lucky, you might get a whole hour or two in the afternoon hands-to-keyboard actually building the thing you're being paid to build, but far more likely you're going to be spending that time hands-to-keyboard writing up lengthy low-level design documentation or support guides that no one is ever going to read for the product that will never get deployed, or putting together a powerpoint deck to explain to the client why their earlier decisions have all gone wrong (taking great effort to avoid the words "so", "you" and "told", of course), or on a twenty-person conference call about the next terrible decision coming down the pipeline.
Another round of coffee, just in time for you to sit down and write up your daily progress report for the programme management and the client, before they go home at four to see the kids. They've been in since 0730, you see, take their word for it.
Before you know it it's half five and your day's hours are all used up. Can't be seen in the office after hours - the IR35 regs get very antsy about behaving like a permanent employee, so off to the pub six or seven hundred quid richer, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
Or at least, set up your legislation and leave it alone for a bit while the IT estate catches up. Unless of course you're looking at a situation where you may have <2 years from a given future date to completely rewrite the basis of one of your most important taxes (£119bn pa at last count) and there's a policy incentive to do away with the existing return regime in favour of real time reporting.
Do we actually need all of these projects? Especially as many of them will fail. If the Government wants to throw money away, it would be better just to convert that into helicopter money where it might do some good. Using it for something actually useful (and therefore potentially vote winning) might be better.
There's waste, but then there is Government waste!
Upvoted for common sense. Unfortunately, it's not always possible to tell which will fail until most of the money has already been spunked away. It could be seen as a form of welfare or quantitative easing if most of the money was stating in the UK, but most likely most of it is going out of the country into tax havens.
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