A Catalogue Of Failure

As we are all aware the UK government's track and trace software and program ....

Track and Trace Failures Predictable

..... has been largely a complete balls up.

Firstly as previously discussed they changed tack mid stream, and abandoned the central database approach, after one of the IT phone giants (Apple) refused to play ball. The UK I.T. track and trace project team had known this was going to be the case, but had proceeded to waste millions on development of a system that was guaranteed to fail.

Now it's emerged that the alternative scheme has been beset with software glitches, that has led to some people in England being told to stop self-isolating on the wrong date by the Test and Trace scheme. Earlier, misuse of Microsoft's Excel software had led to nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases going unreported in England.

Also it had been disclosed that a risk-score threshold used by the NHS Covid-19 App, to trigger self-isolate alerts, had been lowered weeks later than intended. There are no doubt other cock-ups that haven't been disclosed.

But anyone who has had experience of the UK government's IT projects could, and indeed would have predicted this.

As I have discussed on a number of occasions, the problem is that the same contract developers and management that fail on one project are nearly all found working on the next one. This is because the poor Civil Service management believe that someone who has worked elsewhere in the Civil Service will be better than some outsider whose been in private industry (also they have been inculcated with the same bad practices and therefore won't point out the failures).

So failure after failure is the result. Not once has any government tackled this cycle of persistent failure. Yet it would be comparatively easy to put a stop to it.

1. Prevent any I.T. contractor being re-employed by any government department for three years at the end of their current projects. This will force the employment of fresh talent from outside, and stop the cozy, back scratching culture that creates the failures.

2. Make every department train and use only their own business analysts. These would then become the I.T. project managers of the future over a period of time, and stop the IT amateur managers pulled from regional offices being in charge. They are clueless and too easily accept poor code and delivery standards.

But as this culture of I.T. Project failure has been the case for the last forty years, I doubt any changes will ever be made. So millions, nay billions of tax payers money, will be continue to be wasted on I.T. projects that fail, or be poorly delivered.

If Dominic Cummings was half the man he thinks he is, he would make this his number one target for reform, because it leads to more government failure than has ever been admitted.