Universal Credit has replaced Labour’s NHS supercomputer as the ABC of how not to manage an IT project. Just six months after the hip Government Data Service outpost was brought in to take over enhance the project, they’ve been pushed aside. According to the Cabinet Office,’a team within DWP will now take the digital solution forward’— again.
According to some sources, the tensions between the GDS and the Whitehall mandarins arose when Francis Maude sided with the GDS by wanting to bin all the existing work and start from scratch. Writing off three years of work is not to be taken lightly. When faced with such a decision, IT project managers have to ask themselves whether there is ‘no conceivable way we can produce the final product out of the work so far’. Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP disagreed and the existing work has plodded along.
The DWP first attempted to rescue UC by flirting with agile programming.
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