Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita run front-line strategy project that shut down not so many years ago the developers were allowed to quit as full time employees and instantly start back as contractors earning roughly three times as much).
I wonder if it's a coincidence that this project appears to be blossoming while almost every large project I saw that was outsource either massively underachieved or was just buried after huge loses (schoolsweb for example).
I've been part of a large consulting bid for work, and part of the team that executed it. It was horrible.
We were bought in because we knew how to do something, but we won the bid because we simply could do it cheaper than anyone else.
Where it went wrong though, was that even though we knew what to do, once engaged the client insisted on how it would be done and meddled with every part of it.
And the next big failure was our part... our project management team let the client change the requirements frequently even though we told them in no uncertain terms that we were moving from the stated goal and that what was now being asked would not work.
The project management team expanded to deal with the stream of change requests and meddling, and the devs got bogged down with change requests rather than actually driving the project to the project goals.
Finally the project ran out of cash, and what was delivered fitted no-ones needs. It was horrible.
I think the greatest thing that the gov.uk team have been able to achieve is finding the ability to say no when it needed to be said, and to dictate how it should be done right rather than permitting meddling.
It's no surprise that #1 is "Start with needs", and it's less of a surprise that they've had to clarify this is the end user's needs and not the needs of anyone in government.
It's agonizing to me that some of these government bids (my experience is in the US state of California) are required to take the lowest bid that meets the requirements unless they can clearly justify using a more expensive one. Of course, if they put out a general request they would end up with a terrible product, so they tailor their request to the company they want to hire.
Even then, the companies aren't really rewarded for doing a good job. They're rewarded for doing a minimal job that barely meets the requirements and using as much money as they can.
In my experience in the State of California -- mostly from the government side -- the rule is that there are, for each contract put to bid, rating factors and criteria established upfront and you must hire the contractor that scores the highest on those rating factors. That's not usually equivalent to taking the lowest bid.
That being said, this:
> Even then, the companies aren't really rewarded for doing a good job. They're rewarded for doing a minimal job that barely meets the requirements and using as much money as they can.
...is certainly an issue, especially, as is often the case, where reimbursement is based on hours and the contract amount is a limit, so that the incentive is to assure that as many hours are consumed as possible up to the limit.
I wonder if it's a coincidence that this project appears to be blossoming while almost every large project I saw that was outsource either massively underachieved or was just buried after huge loses (schoolsweb for example).