Thus spake PAC on Universal chaos and waste

"...the Department lacked an overarching business transformation strategy, and focused its effort on the programme's IT aspects. The failure to develop a comprehensive plan which will deliver these important changes has led to substantial nugatory expenditure which has yet to be finally determined and extensive delays in the implementation of the programme. 

 The Department accepts that timescales have slipped and that value has not been secured from the X million[s] invested so far. There has been a shocking absence of financial and other internal controls and we are not yet convinced that the Department has robust plans to overcome the problems that have impeded progress. Our recommendations are designed to help get the programme back on track. In particular the Department needs a robust plan on how to transform its business and what is required from the new IT systems it intends to use to support the transformation. If the Department is to secure the benefits it seeks, the new IT capabilities must enable more online operations, must address fraud risks, and result in a system capable of handling the real-world complexities of [key users] circumstances. The Department must be realistic and transparent about its expected costs and timescales, and the milestones against which we can hold it to account. We believe strongly that meeting any specific timetable from now on is less important than delivering the programme successfully."

It's highly likely that a high proportion of the millions invested will have to be written off. Without even getting beyond the summary, it isn't hard to ask "aren't these the basics of PRINCE2 and MSP?"  However, how many other projects could the same narrative apply to with a little 'cut and paste'?

But just in case you thought this was all the fault of IT strategists and policy wonks;  procurement were also named and shamed:

Universal Credit's contract management seems lost in space

I doubt if anyone truthfully expected the NAO Early Progress Report on Universal Credit to be singing its praises – life just isn’t like that. However, tucked away within the woes of the implementation are the added miseries of procurement and contract management.

Universal Credit isn't only one of the Government's flagships, it is one of the Cabinet Office's 12 major programmes - as such it is critical that it acts as a 'how to' exemplar. 

It is hard to believe that a more holistic approach to procuring the IT systems wasn’t pursued. That failure contributed to £34m of new assets being written off. Serious questions should be asked to establish if that £34m write-off could have been avoided, had the procurement approach been to look over the life of the programme as opposed to a narrow pilot. Did the suppliers warn of this potential waste?

Then we see a recommendation:

The Department should improve its ability to challenge suppliers and reduce its reliance on suppliers for important decisions (p.10). 

You will recall the tough talking of 2010 when Francis Maude summoned some of the top suppliers and read the riot act

Effective contract management is consistent service delivery to standard

Supply chain management, Paralympics, IT, sponsorship, risk management, assessments, Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, design, sponsorship, supply risk management, and contract management are within the interesting mix of tags I could have used for this blog. What's the link?

Blurred by media discussion on the DWP Work Programme and the Leveson Report, November also saw the release of the Harrington Report on Year 3 of the Work Capability Assessment. SCM features.

You may be familiar with the WCA and the furore over Atos sponsorship of both the Paralympics and Glasgow 2014. Atos are the public facing part of the DWP Work Capability Assessments. Atos are the perceived 'bad guys' who say whether disabled are fit to work and therefore should lose their benefits. Atos get the blame. It is on 'profits at the expense of disabled' cry that they are not deemed a suitable sponsor.

Therefore, Atos are a contractor who is 'perceived' to hold the power of 'yay' or 'nay' for benefits. To the claimant Atos are not only DWP's representative on earth, they may as well be the DWP. Perceived poor Atos performance reflects not only on DWP but on the Government's welfare reforms. That's where the supply chain meets the customer (in this case the claimant). But upstream are the actual decision makers. Atos are caught in the middle. Given that key role in a supply chain one would expect to see very tight contract management and client led performance management.

Commissioning on a wing and a prayer

We have been inundated with discussions around the Work Programme and the associated  communications debacle.  For example, the coincidental removal of what appeared to be inconsistent guidance from the DWP website and my own comments on the due diligence associated with the appointment the 'Tsar of Contract Manipulation'.  However, I now want to draw on some insights from an  excellent academic paper which strikes me as pertinent, namely Don Harradine's paper published in Public Money and Management.

Don explored a different DWP initiative, 'LinkAge Plus', and interviewed staff from DWP, a local authority and the third sector. His findings are intriguing and resonate with some of my previous blogs:

• Proposals were developed in haste for political expediency while funding was available and it is was therefore accepted they would be flawed;
• Pilots were agreed and funded partly to justify a political agenda;
• DWP were reluctant to probe potential third sector providers' quotation costs: "if they say they can do it for that cost, that will do me"; 
• Third sector providers though lacked sufficient financial expertise to understand the relative costs associated with service delivery;
• There was a lack of agreed definitions on some aspects of contract delivery, for example, what constituted 'a contact';
• Third sector providers acquiesced on agreement of targets just to obtain the funding, even though the targets were not understood.

We need to be wary of reading across too much from Harradine's research to other DWP programmes, but

The perverse outcomes of results based contracts

“That’s another fine mess you’ve got me into”, said Dave to IDS (I suspect) when today’s Daily Mail arrived through the letterbox of No.10.

The headlines suggested it had all gone horribly wrong (again) on the procurement front.  Fresh on the heels of the CX of the UK Student Loans Company promoting tax avoidance, here was a ‘Tsar’ getting an £8.6m dividend through what appears to be promoting contract avoidance.

In a nutshell the story is the lethal mix of:

• A Tsar
• The DWP Work Programme
• The Tsar is paid a dividend from her company
• The company’s only customer is the public sector
• The main customer is the Work Programme
• The company’s delivery performance has been abysmal, namely, 9-24.2% ‘back to work’ as opposed to the target of 30%
• Half the company’s subcontractors are the third sector.

It looks like the main beneficiary in getting 120,000 troubled households into work was the main shareholder of a poor performing contractor. I suggest she would be better as the Tsar of Contract Manipulation. To take Dave’s previous endorsement out of context “… I know we can count on her to help drive this campaign forward”.  It seems to me that