Reply to post: Sympathy for the devil

Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

Tom 38

Sympathy for the devil

NB: I don't work for GDS!

These sorts of projects inevitably have these sorts of reactions. The project is a simplification project - take all the shit on 300 websites, condense it down to one standard and get rid of all the useless crap.

There are two ways you can do this,

1) you can spend many many years enumerating what all the useless crap is, design a system that encapsulates all the needs of those 300 systems, work out a fully complete plan to move it all over, and execute those plans.

2) work out the rough basis of what is required, the "minimal marketable features", implement them, handle whatever fallout there is, improving the new system to the point where it works.

Clearly they went with option 2, its "agile", and its much quicker to initial delivery.

With option 1, you should get a lot less of these issues, but this is not what has happened historically in government IT. By trying to cover everything, requirements grow to the point where the project is a massive behemoth that can only be tackled by one of the usual outsourcing suspects, and often has requirements that differ wildly to the point that the project may not be possible to be delivered.

So, they went with option 2 - its the cheap option, we're a cheap country, we have to put up with the cheap implementation. If they are truly agile however, they should now be identifying all these new user stories that they need to implement, and continuously improve the site until it does do what is required.

With agile, the proof of the pudding is not in the eating; invariably with agile it will taste like shit first off, but it should mature in to something suitable for purpose.

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