Comments on: Sign my petition to the PM to demand the UK Govt. reviews it’s failed IT processes

By: E-petition for better UK government procurement of IT | Domain Driven Design using Naked Objects

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:37:07 +0000

[...] procurement of IT Here in the UK we have the ability to petition our prime minister. So Rob Bowley has set up an e-petition asking the government to review how IT systems are procured. In essence: [...]

By: rob bowley - adventures in software craftsmanship » Blog Archive » A call to action to UK software developers to stop your money being wasted

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:09:32 +0000

[...] I write, the petition to demand the UK government reviews it’s outdated I.T. project processes has been going for a week and has 193 [...]

By: Mike Dorey

Mike Dorey — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:18:49 +0000

Hi There

Nick Oostvogels sums up the situation perfectly. And bear in mind that this isn’t confined to government: It’s the way many companies and organisations operate as well.

By: Nick Oostvogels

Nick Oostvogels — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:02:30 +0000

I’ve given this a lot of though as well. According to me, one of the major issues that lie at the root of these failures is their annual budgetting process. This pushes them into a waterfall approach, where everything needs to be poored into a nice fixed price contract up front. Changes are not allowed, because we need to fit into the budget. On the other hand, there’s no rush to work more efficient, because eventual leftovers will not be rewarded. Spend it on something else or they will be gone. If we can’t change this, agile will always be hard to sell to government.

By: Nic Wise

Nic Wise — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:25:20 +0000

Sounds very much like the NZ Police INCIS system, which IBM “developed” in the mid 90’s, I think.

Wow, it even has a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INCIS

That said, aren’t these systems on the same scale as the original “XP” project, which Kent Beck and co came up with XP from – and wasn’t that, um, less than successful? (tho we could argue that XP coming out of it was worth the money…..)

Maybe the problem is more that the risk on a large IT project is high – very very high. XP is going to mitigate that somewhat, and waterfall is going to make it worse, but even half of a huge risk is still a really big risk.

Maybe that needs to be addressed – smaller projects, no replace everything ones. But then the big players dont make as much money, because their “advantage” over smaller, leaner software houses is gone.