Tories plan for £100m cap on government IT contracts

[ratewhore]

Splitting a £1bn project into ten £100m projects would at least make the projects more manageable. Divide and conquer, and all that.

And increase the size and complexity of the PMO. Someone said something about chiefs and indians once which seems quite pertinent...

[AlfredJPruffock]

The problem is that we would have our new NHS system being used in Bongo Bongo land. The average Joe in the street would not be able to understand why we were giving a way our software for free.

In all honesty if they formed an open source group they would have finished the project by now and probably would have spent only a few million but then how many of you are getting paid good money to work on this project?

Also from my experience of working on public sector it is often the end users that demand daft things that screw the project. I worked on a very large system that was meant to replace an old mainframe terminal system with a web based system running of Apache to save maintenance costs. The spec was for it to look and behave exactly like the old system so that there would be no retraining to the new system. They had to use java script to map all the action key strokes then when they had finished that bit they worked out that many of the users were using opera or firefox and not just IE as first stated. It was total murder.

Rather than write an intuitive web system that anyone could have picked up in an hour they tried to copy the old system with is hundreds of shortcuts. It should have taken 3 months but they kept flogging this thing for 5 years until it got canned.

They were not happy when I told them they should have just run a mainframe emulator on the new boxes and the job would have been finished in 2 hours. Why anyone never thought of that in the first place is a sign they should not have been near the job

That is an astonishing story - many thanks Minestrone.

Would you mind if I send this for the attention of an old friend of mine who now happens to be in the Tory Cabinet ?

He would find this fascinating.

He used to be a Doctor as well so he is pretty au fait with the NHS too.

[minestrone]

That is an astonishing story - many thanks Minestrone.

Would you mind if I send this for the attention of an old friend of mine who now happens to be in the Tory Cabinet ?

He would find this fascinating.

He used to be a Doctor as well so he is pretty au fait with the NHS too.

This one was a few years ago and already hit the papers, I can try to find it, it was a pc plod system.

[Mich the Tester]

And increase the size and complexity of the PMO. Someone said something about chiefs and indians once which seems quite pertinent...

More projects means more testers, more DBAs, more coders, more designers and more project managers. In other words, more contractors. BOOMED!

[portseven]

Some people say the same about switching between versions of Office...

Now where was that thingie in this version?

That's why when I install OpenOffice.org for people, I just rename the icons Word, Excel and Powerpoint, set the default document format to be the Microsoft ones and just tell them I have upgraded them to the new version of Microsoft Office. They are happy as bunnies.