Our system handles £130bn and it's BUST. Want the job of fixing it? Apply to UK.gov The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has identified "technical and security vulnerabilities" in its £284.9m central benefits payment system - responsible for underpinning the much-maligned Universal Credit programme and processing 13 million payments each week, The Register can reveal. The Central Payments System's …
"The job advert also said the contractor will "initially be focused on the project to re-mediate the Enhanced Transition Service Enhancements (ETSE) solution which has been out of support/security accreditation since 2013.""
Stick big hard words in there, but actually say nothing then.
"re-mediate the Enhanced Transition Service Enhancements (ETSE) solution" = Fix the bungled supposed upgrade
WTF - Enhanced and Enhancements in the same axronym! They really do need to get over themselves and start thinking about get the job done
Usually that kind of weirdness comes from compounded acronyms. so they probably started off with the Transition Service, which was abbreviated to TS, then they had the Enhanced Transition Service, ETC and now they're building the Enhanced Transition Service Enhancements, ETSE. They wouldn't have used the full name when naming it though, it would be the Enhanced TS, then the ETS Enhancements, and the weirdness only appears after you state the full name
"The contractor will initially be focussed on the project to remediate the Enhanced Transition Service Enhancements (ETSE) solution which has been out of support/security accreditation since 2013."
Yeah, you can deconstruct a lot of previous grief from that sentence. "We had a Transition Service, and we tried to enhance it, but it was still badly dehanced so we got a solution to enhance it all over again, but we built it on technology which is now not supported and therefore the accreditors won't give us the Authority to Operate, and it's not legal to run it, like since 2013, ... " [sobs and groans removed in editing]
Sounds like a cesspit, and I'd want a lot more than £650 per diem to be thinking of cleaning it up.
"The successful candidate will have experience of a technical integration in a public sector environment".
Why, what is so magical about the public sector environment? I can think of a lot of sarcastic reasons, but I'd like to know the genuine reasoning behind lines like that, other than some HR droids copy / paste recruitment technique.
It might be to do with the security enforcement regime in the DWP; it will help if the contractor knows how accreditation works in the public sector. There is also the fact that you won't be working for a single director who's empowered to make decisions (which is probably why the enhanced re-enhanced unsupportable system needs attention like this), but you'll have to answer to any number of committees and stakeholders. It'll take a month or two to get your head around the project management structure, I reckon, and it'll be easier to do if you've been close to such, umm, exotic arrangements in the past.
You must be able to cope with the goalposts being moved around by many different parties almost constantly. That's if they were constructed in the first place.
(Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about either, but this is what I hear most often from people that work in/with public sector. Frankly I'm willing to forgive even the biggest bastard money-grabbing mega-corporation if nobody can actually put a finger on what they were asked to deliver)
How is this different from pretty much every other gov sponsored IT programme?
For the vendors its all just money for old rope.
I was in a meeting with that gov czar guy a while back and asked about quality in projects...answer was shoulder sloped with "cheapest wins".
Utter cock.
I do know my way around Oracle EBS - although its not my prime focus - and that rate is about half of what I would expect for a role like this.
Either they have someone in house who is just looking to move to contractor status for the tax advantages or they are deluded in terms of what they will have to pay. Personally, I wouldn't touch this for 3 times that rate because I'm sure it would be a career-ender.
A few years back I used the DWP's new online system to register as unemployed. Filled in all the information and clicked OK. I got a message saying that everything was fine and that my claim had been registered. Some weeks later having heard nothing from DWP I checked the claim online and it showed a status of pending. Assuming I had forgotten to click on the commit button I submitted it again. Again I got a message saying that the claim had been accepted.
Later I registered my claim by phone in the usual way. Did they backdate my claim, did they fuck. Apparently believing the DWP computer is not a sufficient reason for failing to file a claim by phone.
Turned out that the system was silently returning all of the applications to "pending" status after they had been submitted and acknowledged. Seems to me that a system that can send a false acceptance message probably has architecture issues.
I suspect that the system went live without ever being seen by a competent architect. So I'm sure that DWP management doesn't have any competent development staff because it doesn't know how to hire competent people. It doesn't know how to hire people who can identify competent people.
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