Why Has Universal Credit Been Such A Disaster For The Government?
Universal Credit: DWP battled with GDS, was overly ambitious with timelines and considered suing suppliers
Warzone
At the time it considered suing its suppliers, DWP’s senior responsible owner David Pitchford, brought with him key staff from the Government Digital Service (GDS).
But this had huge implications. Lord David Freud, now minister of state for welfare reform, is quoted by Timmins as stating that GDS were “very naïve” about how complex it would be to build Universal Credit, and were “messianic about building the front-end in an agile way, front-facing, with their beautiful apps”.
He said this was partly right, but slammed them for not realising how complicated it was to tie this to the legacy back office systems that were already in place.
Howard Shiplee, who took over from Pritchard, said that the GDS team “would not even discuss the preceding work done by the DWP and its IT suppliers”.
They had, he says, “a messiah-like approach that they were going to rebuild everything from scratch”. He equally questioned how DWP’s IT department had managed to get the entire process so wrong up until that point.
Agile v waterfall
The Cabinet Office remained adamant that the DWP should simply switch to the new digital version, which would take far longer to build than anticipated. It warned the DWP that using the original software would mean “creating a temporary service and temporary will become permanent”.
This led to a defining meeting between DWP and the Cabinet Office (which includes GDS), in which they had to decide whether to give up on the original build or run a twin-track approach using both agile and waterfall methods.
They decided to go with the twin-track approach, and it has had a lasting effect on the programme ever since. One IT director not directly involved in the programme told Timmins that when he asked people how the Universal Credit programme was going, they would “suck their teeth”.
Quiz: What do you know about public sector IT?
“You just knew it was going wrong. The whole agile approach was nonsense,” he said.
While neither approach can be deemed as being the ‘right’ one, Jessica Figereas, chief analyst at Kable, explains that agile suits projects which are continually changing, like Universal Credit.
“The problem with ‘waterfall’ is that it assumes that at the start everything is going to go brilliantly, and that everyone involved in the requirements of such a programme are omniscient and can tell the future of what the system is going to be,” she says.
The agile methodology, she says, is designed with change in mind.
“With agile you’re always doing small pieces of the project and learning on the job, and working within the confines of architecture which allows for flexibility so you can carefully separate any concerns. You’re taking a strategic overview of everything you’re doing,” she says.
“Whitehall was at the earliest stage of this and simply didn’t know how to work [in an agile way] yet,” she adds.
