UK Rural Payments Agency (RPA): IT failure and gross incompetence screws farmers

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Business as usual

I have worked on a number of large UK government projects and they usually go as follows:

1. Get a senior civil servent who knows nothing about what is required to specify the requirements.

2. Hire a large US based consultancy or software firm to implement it for an agreed figure 15 times the cost that the average reasonably clued up UK IT consultancy or developer would charge. The high paid lawyers for the selected company will run rings around the Governments lawyers and the number of "gotcha's" in the contract will only become apparent once work has comenced and it's impossible to cancel without loosing face publicly and wasting vast sums of public money.

3. This contractor will then outsource all the software development to a third world country (who must use English as a second language) using new graduates or anyone who can get a faked diploma; the implementation team will be sourced locally but "as cheap as we can get", otherwise they'll bring in staff from the offshore company (onshoring).

4. The Project manager will be selected for say a national database project on the basis that he successfully implemented the CEO's Christmas card database project using access.

5 Any staff being expected to use the system will either be immediately alienated by the lack of input they will be given into the process, the arrogant attitude of the project members, or because they have worked out there will be massive job cuts as a "benefit" of implementing the system.

Think that pretty much sums it up

Posted by: BobF_z   Posted on: 12/18/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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