[buro9]

The US (and rest of world) should take a leaf out of the UK's recent initiative: GDS (Government Digital Services)

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

Aside from creating https://www.gov.uk/ which laid down a lot of principles on how to fulfil a government contract (as well as the foundations of what goverment websites should look like and how they should be developed), GDS is also looking at the problem of procurement.

The GDS team essentially are wrestling back from the big contractors the major contracts, breaking the work down into a large number of bitesize contracts and then farming them out to a wide variety of smaller vendors.

So instead of finding a Fujitsu/Siemens JV team, or an IBM Professional Services team, operating a £50m project, the plan is to offer 100 x £250k projects to a large number of smaller suppliers instead. Each project having a clearer purpose that is more able to be fulfilled.

Of course there are obvious overheads in managing so many projects, and of course some of these projects will fail. But... overall the savings will be such that the overheads are cheap, and the failed projects will only have a smaller impact on a major programme initiative than a failure would today.

[wozniacki]

This week a UK parliamentary watchdog described a failed National Health Service patient IT programme – the cost of which has spiralled to £9.8bn – as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. Earlier this month the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that it had written off £34m of IT costs, incurred in an attempt to overhaul how social security benefits are paid. A week earlier Co-operative Bank said it had written off the £148m cost of a new IT system that would no longer be implemented.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/794bbb56-1f8e-11e3-8861-00144feab7...

[Swannie]

All outsourced.

GDS is trying to in-source a lot of work that should be controlled by a central publishing and transaction design group, and contracting out the relatively boring task of following their rules. Good idea, as long as their architecture/design/program management review boards are well staffed and motivated.

I don't think they will stop these large failures. And many of these large failures do have clear up-front requirements that cannot be changed. Iterative waterfall is not so terrible.

[hga]

Funny thing is, as far as we can tell this is how that project was done, minus the contract size sorts of splits. The government didn't hire a integrator, HHS's CMS took on that responsibility including integration testing.

Of course the minor fly in the ointment is that CMS didn't even vaguely have the expertise to pull this off; the Pentagon can do this for medium sizes weapons projects (which are a rather different field), but no one else in the US government has been said to have it.

[tfgg]

All projects that were definitely not under GDS' management, more likely Crapita.