Universal Credit: 'One dole to rule 'em all' on verge of recovery – report

Ah I see - it would have been fine if they had got you to do it.

From my knowledge of the scope (and I worked on several DWP systems, but not UC) it didn't matter who was managing it, the scope was always going to be too big and too vast to be successful. I've commented on this before, but in case anyone missed it:

The idea of UC had been hanging around the dept for years before 2011 (I heard about it as a concept, albeit with a different name, in 2007), but subsequent ministers and senior bods had always turned it down as it looked like a disaster waiting to happen, The difference was Ian Duncan Smith was the first one to say yes.

More like the banishment of GDS to the proverbial wilderness.

Re: New elReg Metric?

Femto Universal Credit.

Re: Well, that's encouraging then

"The source of may problems has been the absence of a detailed view of how Universal Credit is meant to work"

Replace the words, "Universal Credit" with "Withdrawal from the European Union", and you have the title of the next act in this farce, where we watch those in power slowly steering this country in ever decreasing circles like an bath toy circling the plughole...

Re: "IT-enabled business changes "

The implementation the usual clusterf**k of no clear idea from the client

But have you noticed the trend:

Defence procurement: Clusterf**k; Rail franchising: Clusterf**k; Transport planning: Clusterf**k; Energy policy: Clusterf**k; Housing policy: Clusterf**k; Hand out of framing grants: Clusterf**k; Health service management: Clusterf**k; Foreign aid: Clusterf**k; HS2: Clusterf**k to be.....etc

What this seems to me to be is evidence that government is essentially incompetent in everything it touches. When I started this post I was hypothesising that this was because government couldn't deal with commercial companies, but when you look at the epic policy fails on energy, transport planning, NHS or foreign aid, there's not that much private sector involvement, it's largely insourced and world class clusterf**kery.

Not that government's incompetence should give private contractors the right to shaft the tax payer, but the solution here is for better project management, where a project can't start without a definitive and final specification, that those specs may not be changed for the sort of trivial reasons that current projects usually do. Write all of this in law, with jail sentences for breach of these rules. And then staff up the procurement team with people who are paid as much as the vendor bid teams, and who have the resource to fully understand the bidder's value model and planned margin, so that we don't have the nonsense of accepting lowest bids that cannot ever be profitable without variation. Indeed, in many respects it is EU Public Procurement rules that encourage this nonsense, by failing to understand that the lowest compliant bid is not always, usually, sometimes the best value. This could be a big opportunity of Brexit, but I very much doubt that British politicians and civil servants will see and seize the opportunity to do something directionally similar, but better. After all, it's not their money they waste.

Re: "Unrealistic timetables ...

That entirely depends on your definitions of the words 'defined by an existing set of rules'. You are assuming that those rules are all well defined and that none of them contradict each other for starters.

I think the problem here might be the attempt to project formal logic onto the eldritch abomination that is the benefits system; dreamed up, and reshaped over years, by politicians, a group for whom internal consistency has never been a concept.