FEATURE: UNIVERSAL CREDIT

INCREMENTAL IT
Brian Wernham asks if the Governments Universal Credit programme is just another victim of Water-Scrum-Fall.

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roject leadership has been identied as a key factor in major projects failing to deliver high quality outcomes on time and to budget. It is the role of the Major Projects Authority (MPA) to ensure that technical expertise is considered and tested within assurance reviews and the risks are both understood and managed. MPA is working to ensure reviewers are in place who have experience and understanding of the new agile approach. Many central Government departments have been adopting a more incremental approach to projects, especially those that depend on IT systems development. For example, the DVLA is putting live various new systems incrementally, such as the automation of links between vehicle ownership and insurance information. Police patrol cars and CCTV cameras are now using number plate recognition technology to stop and search uninsured vehicles, often uncovering much more serious offences in the process. Not all attempts at incremental digital development and implementation have been successful. The UK Border Agency (UKBA), for example, with its annual spend of more than 2bn, tried switching to an incremental approach on its failing 385m Immigration Case Work (ICW) project. But, although a time and materials approach was adopted, allowing a exible approach to re-scoping the work, the project board did not monitor the situation carefully enough. Within two years, the project was in red status and the UKBAs operations were thrown into chaos when the project end date was put back by three years. The new case work system is still not in use, and the UKBA has been scrapped with its operations subsumed into the Home Ofce.

NEW STRATEGY
When the coalition Government came into power, it introduced a new IT Strategy intended to ensure that incremental development would be more systematic, making new IT projects less risky. Firstly, the Cabinet Ofce stated that no new project would spend more than 100m on development before starting to deliver change. Secondly, the emerging approach of agile development would be rolled out to at least half of all IT projects by April 2013. Finally, all major projects would have continuity of sponsorship in the form of a single senior responsible owner (SRO) throughout their life. There has been one exception to this rule Universal Credit. This massive programme is intended to replace a hodgepodge of existing benets and tax credit top-ups with a single monthly payment to claimants that includes a subsidy to work. For example, if a single parent who has a part-time job starts to work more hours, he/she will be sure that for every extra 1 earned, no more than 65p will be removed from benets, creating an incentive to work harder and to be independent. To make these calculations, the Universal Credit system, which is being developed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), has to make endishly complicated calculations based not just on the income of one person, but everyone else in the household. To make things worse, there is the lobster pot principle. This was agreed more than three years ago as what seemed like a simple way of smoothing the pilot use of Universal Credit in Pathnder Jobcentres. Once a claimant is in the Universal Credit system, he/ she remains in it no matter how complex their life becomes. For instance, if that lone parent gets

Brian is currently investigating setting up an APM Lean and Agile Projects Specic Interest Group. If you are interested in being involved, please contact him at brian. wernham@gmail.com

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FEATURE: UNIVERSAL CREDIT

married and their new partner is also on a very low wage, the system will have to take into account the wages of both earners in a single, integrated calculation. In April this year, the pilot use of the system started with simple plain vanilla claimants. But lobster pot problems arose when wages started to be earned. For a start, there was the difculty of matching the claimants tax payer reference to their National Insurance number and also the complication of housing benet calculations. And what if someone else in the household claims disability allowance?

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AGILE DEVELOPMENT
In order to build this complicated new system while policy and regulations were being nalised, the DWP chose to adopt an agile development approach in the programming team. This approach is based on an inversion of the Iron Triangle of project management, rst popularised by Dr Martin Barnes. Put simply, the traditional approach to technology development and implementation projects is to specify all the required features of a deliverable upfront, and then deal with wide variations in time and cost as the project progresses. Often, quality is compromised. Agile project management frameworks, such as the open method known as Dynamic Systems Development

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Method (DSDM), invert this approach by xing cost and quality. They ensure iterative development and frequent, phased implementation of the product into real-world use, so as to ensure what is being built and delivered really works, rather than simply conforming to a theoretical specication. These frameworks provide advice on organising the development team, and make adoption of popular team level proprietary methods of development, such as Scrum, easier. One of the biggest criticisms of the Universal Credit programme has been that Scrum, or at least a variation of it, was used without the wrapper of a project management framework such as DSDM. In fact, a review by the Cabinet Ofce in December 2012, found that not only was a project framework missing, but that the overall programme approach did not make use of Cabinet Ofce good practice guidance known as Managing Successful Programmes (MSP).

LESSONS TO LEARN
1. An agile method, such as Scrum, for running a programming team, is just that. If you want project governance, scope control, a robust business case, effective risk management, legacy interfaces, user training and planning for incremental operational readiness, then you will also need an agile project framework wrapper such as DSDM. 2. On large change programmes you will need good stakeholder communications, benets realisation planning, a clear vision of the Target Operating Model (TOM) and also the intermediate TOMs, each being the result of a phase of intermediate delivery and incremental go-live that MSP advises. 3. Large programmes of work will always include elements of waterfall project management. This could be due to legacy contracts with suppliers that are bureaucracy bound, or the use of old mainframe systems. Agile projects will have to co-exist alongside waterfall projects for some time to come this is a fact of life that programme governance advice, such as MSP, addresses. 4. Organisations need more project management skills to ensure succession planning, and this means investing in training and capacity building using skills frameworks such as the professional Bodies of Knowledge.

THE ROOT OF MOST PROJECT EVIL IS POOR GOVERNANCE.

has been dogged by more than just problems caused by the adoption of a Water-Scrum-Fall in a DSDM-less and MSP-less governance vacuum. Through a series of unfortunate incidents, DWP went through ve SROs in less than a year. When DWP ran out of senior project directors, it asked the Cabinet Ofce to parachute in MPA executive director David Pitchford as an interim for three months. David is now back in Australia, and the recent arrival of Howard Shiplee from his successes as construction director on the Olympic Delivery Authority for the London Olympics should stabilise the project. The recent report from the National Audit Ofce (NAO) revealed that more than 425m has been spent on the development of Universal Credit a far cry from the IT Strategy promise of all projects being less than 100m and implemented incrementally. On 29 April, the IT stuttered into life, with a temporary system being implemented in just one Jobcentre to cater for the simplest vanilla benets claimants. In a Parliamentary Committee session a few weeks ago, ministers revealed that in the rst two months of use, fewer than 200 people had been enrolled. The MPs on the committee had gone to the Manchester Jobcentre to see the process and watched claimant enrolments being carried out by staff. Information from the temporary system had to be re-typed again and again into various other systems as the number of complex lobster pot cases started to increase. The interfaces were just not ready. Since then, only a further 800 claimants have been processed and the plans for any further roll-out have been frozen pending Treasury review. The Cabinet Ofces assessment is that the temporary system in use at the moment should form the basis for the core system for the future. It remains to be seen how much of the 425m spent on the rest of the system can be salvaged, and how much will be written off.

WATER-SCRUM-FALL
The overall development strategy on Universal Credit was the use of a Scrum-like approach to programming, while the programme as a whole still remained in the waterfall world of a big design up front with an unrealistic implementation plan. This was based on a big-bang go-live that was supposed to have taken place this month. Of course, once the team is in a waterfall, it is impossible to swim back up and change direction. This use of team level Scrum-like development methods within a waterfall wrapper has been coined Water-Scrum-Fall, and is a perennial problem for go-ahead programmers who want to be agile, but whose management just dont get it. Those who know my work on the APM Governance Specic Interest Group will not be surprised to hear what I am about to say the root of most project evil is poor governance. The Universal Credit programme

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