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INCREMENTAL ITBrian Wernhamasks if the Governments Universal Credit

programme is just another victim of Water-Scrum-Fall.

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F E A T U R E : U N I V E R S A L C R E D I T

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Project leadership has been identified

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 testedwithin 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 flexible

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 Office.

Brian is currently

investigating setting

up an APM Lean and

Agile Projects Specific

Interest Group. If

you are interested in

being involved, please

contact him at brian.

wernham@gmail.com

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 Office stated that no new

project would spend more than 100m ondevelopment 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 benefits 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 benefits, 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 fiendishly 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 Pathfinder 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

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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 difficulty

of matching the claimants tax payer

reference to their National Insurance

number and also the complication of

housing benefit calculations. And what

if someone else in the household claims

disability allowance?

AGILE DEVELOPMENT

In order to build this complicated new

system while policy and regulations

were being finalised, 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, first

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

PROJECT READER OFFER

Readers can access

a free extract from Brian

Wernhams book,

Agile Project Management

for Government, here

http://bit.ly/About-Brian

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F E A T U R E : U N I V E R S A L C R E D I T

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LESSONS TO LEARN

THE ROOT OF MOST PROJECT EVILIS POOR GOVERNANCE.

Method (DSDM), invert this approach

by fixing 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 atheoretical specification.

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 Office

in December 2012, found that not onlywas a project framework missing, but

that the overall programme approach

did not make use of Cabinet Office good

practice guidance known as Managing

Successful Programmes (MSP).

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 Specific 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

1. An agile method, such as Scrum, for runninga programming team, is just that. If you wantproject governance, scope control, a robustbusiness case, effective risk management,legacy interfaces, user training and planning forincremental operational readiness, then you willalso need an agile project framework wrappersuch as DSDM.

2. On large change programmes you will need goodstakeholder communications, benefits realisationplanning, a clear vision of the Target OperatingModel (TOM) and also the intermediate TOMs,each being the result of a phase of intermediatedelivery and incremental go-live that MSP advises.

3. Large programmes of work will always includeelements of waterfall project management.This could be due to legacy contracts withsuppliers that are bureaucracy bound, or theuse of old mainframe systems. Agile projectswill have to co-exist alongside waterfallprojects for some time to come this is a factof life that programme governance advice,such as MSP, addresses.

4. Organisations need more project managementskills to ensure succession planning, andthis means investing in training and capacitybuilding using skills frameworks such as theprofessional Bodies of Knowledge.

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 five SROs in less than

a year. When DWP ran out of senior

project directors, it asked the Cabinet

Office 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 Office (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

benefits claimants. In a Parliamentary

Committee session a few weeks ago,

ministers revealed that in the first 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 Offices 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.

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