Waterfall Wanderers 0 - 0 Agile Athletic

As we were saying:

The traditional approach to software development is often known as 'waterfall' development: that is, you plan, build, test, review and then deploy, in a relentless cascade. But some IT industry players regard this practice as the chief problem ...A rather different answer which has emerged in the last ten to fifteen years has been what are called 'Agile Systems', perhaps best described as a philosophical movement in action within the software industry.

The quotation comes, of course, from Richard Bacon MP and Christopher Hope's Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it, pp.240-1. Here we are, back again, asking why government IT systems too often go over budget and what we can do about it.

The fashionable answer is that the problem is the "waterfall" engineering of software systems and the solution is "agile" engineering. Waterfall bad, agile good. That's the idea. Let's explore it a little.

Waterfall is always associated with Winston W Royce (1929-95) and, to hear people talking about waterfall these days, you'd think he was a bit of an idiot. Actually, he was a rocket scientist who got into large-scale software engineering and ended up running IT for Lockheed.

The reason he bears the blame for the British government wasting a fortune on IT, by common consent, is something to do with a paper he published in 1970, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. A paper in which, incidentally, the word "waterfall" doesn't appear.

On the other hand, this diagram does appear:

That looks like a waterfall. To some people. Is that the smoking gun?

No.

Royce calls that a "grandiose" approach to systems development and he doesn't recommend it because it omits the "iterative relationship between successive development phases" shown in his next diagram:

He prefers this iterative approach in theory but he believes that in practice it "is risky and invites failure" because of the problem illustrated below – the developers can get locked in a loop, iterating away forever, never deploying the system, never releasing it into the field, it never moves into operational use:

Is that what's happened to the agile-loving Government Digital Service (GDS) and their so-called "transformation programme" with its 25 "exemplars"?

The dial seems to have been stuck on "1" for the number of live services for a very long time.

The single live service is exemplar #6 – Student Finance, which was released no later than 31 October 2012, please see Refining transactions with help from the Minister.

That's 18 months ago. What's going on with the other 24 exemplars? Has the "operations" box become disconnected from the rest of the agile development process, as predicted by Royce?

Maybe.

Are GDS suffering from the lack of an identity assurance service? Would they have done better to stick with the Government Gateway?

Maybe.

Or is it something to do with this paragraph which appears under the 1/7/16/1 dashboard:

The Government Digital Strategy and departmental digital strategies commit us to the redesigning and rebuilding of 25 significant ‘exemplar’ services. We’re going to make them simpler, clearer and faster to use. All these are to meet the Digital By Default Service Standard by April 2014 and be completed by March 2015.

All 25 exemplars have to meet the digital by default service standard in no more than 30 days time. What does that mean? Never mind.

Look at that "March 2015" at the end of the quotation. Surely no politicians think that releasing 24 digital services at the same time as launching their manifesto will help them to win the UK general election two months later in May 2015, do they?

Maybe.

We don't know why progress has stalled, but it has – agile doesn't seem to be doing any better than waterfall.

What would Royce have recommended 44 years ago? Do your program design first, he said, keep your documentation up to date, do a prototype, test thoroughly and involve the customer. In a nutshell, this – the bit to the left of the dotted line:

Whatever it is, it isn't a waterfall. Not as we know it.

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Updated 4.12.15

As far as the Government Digital Service (GDS) is concerned, agile is the only methodology for successful software engineering. They have always said that. Ex-Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE ex-CDO ex-CDO, ex-executive director of GDS and ex-senior responsible owner of the pan-government identity assurance programme now known as "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)", said it in connection with the UK's digital Basic Payment Scheme for farmers, for example:

I go weekly now. I go to the meeting of the Common Agricultural Policy Reform Group. It's the RPA. It's the Rural Payments Agency. Why I'm so excited about that is because they've embraced agile completely. They're going with an agile build out of a whole new programme. That's going to affect everyone in this country, and how they deal with land management, all the farmers, all the people who deal with crops, all the data. It's going to create, I think, a data industry around some of that data. It's going to help us deal with Europe in a different way, and quite rightly we're building it as a platform. It's going to be another example of government as a platform.

And yet the digital BPS failed and our farmers now have to apply for their money using pencil and paper.

The National Audit Office have published their report on this failure, Early review of the Common Agricultural Policy Delivery Programme. And they say:

GDS provided limited continuity and insufficient insight into how to adopt agile on this scale. It was not able to identify and provide the systems integration skills required ... (p.9) ... the Cabinet Office [i.e. GDS] should ... provide stronger written guidance and capability building for departments on agile management and governance for major projects and how it fits with traditional governance structures ... [and should] support departments in acquiring the management and technical skills required to apply agile at scale ...(p.12) The Department [DEFRA, the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs] and the RPA [Rural Payments Agency] had no experience of the agile approach. The Department felt it did not receive sufficient support from GDS given the level of experience of Programme staff, leading to poor application of agile. Programme governance was not adapted to quick iterative development cycles. (p.22) The Department told us it sought guidance in 2013 from GDS on best practice for agile governance, but guidance on this was not published until June 2014. (p.28) The Department and the RPA described GDS support as patchy. There was little continuity in personnel and GDS staff were reported to have provided insufficient insight into the use of agile at this scale. (p.33) Many of the commitments GDS made to the Department are vague. For example, it did not quantify the savings that the use of agile would achieve: “no formal estimates of cost savings will be offered but previous experience of operating in an agile manner would suggest a significant cost reduction can be expected from traditional approaches to large scale IT procurement”. It was agreed that the Memorandum of Understanding would be reviewed every six months at Programme Board level, but this did not happen. (p.33) More comprehensive guidance on agile management would help departments align governance for major projects with traditional governance structures. (p.34)

It looks as though GDS's enthusiastic advocacy of agile methodology is based more on fashion than useful practical experience. They may be keen but, when confronted with the reality of a public service, it looks as though GDS can't deliver.


Updated 7.9.16

Universal Credit – From disaster to recovery? Good question.

That's the title of a report just published by the Institute for Government (IfG). Has Universal Credit (UC) flirted with disaster? Yes it has. Is it possible that UC will one day succeed? Yes it is.

UC is a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) initiative. The report provides some insight into the IT problems of UC and the occasionally fraught relationship between DWP and the Government Digital Service (GDS):

The reason it took 'much longer than they originally thought it would', according to Lord Freud, was that the GDS team were initially 'very naïve' about just how complex it was to build Universal Credit. He says: They were messianic about building the front end, doing it in an agile way, front facing, with their beautiful apps, and they were right about all of that. But they had no grasp of how complicated it was to tie the front end to the legacy back-office, these old and creaky legacy systems we have with which it had to work – the customer information system, the debt management system, the payment system and all the things you need to run 20 million people and their records, and with all that implied.

There's a lot more where that came from (p.53) for anyone interested.

The IfG report identifies a lot of problems faced by UC including unrealistic timetables, DWP overload, lack of in-house skills and poor governance. "Waterfall" software engineering methods were not the only problem. "Agile" also was a problem. Nothing in the report demonstrates that "agile" is the solution – some of that earlier fashionable "messianic" ardour was misplaced ...

... and is now waning, please see for example The Tyranny of Agile.

Waterfall Wanderers 0 - 0 Agile Athletic

As we were saying:

The traditional approach to software development is often known as 'waterfall' development: that is, you plan, build, test, review and then deploy, in a relentless cascade. But some IT industry players regard this practice as the chief problem ...A rather different answer which has emerged in the last ten to fifteen years has been what are called 'Agile Systems', perhaps best described as a philosophical movement in action within the software industry.

The quotation comes, of course, from Richard Bacon MP and Christopher Hope's Conundrum: Why every government gets things wrong and what we can do about it, pp.240-1. Here we are, back again, asking why government IT systems too often go over budget and what we can do about it.

The fashionable answer is that the problem is the "waterfall" engineering of software systems and the solution is "agile" engineering. Waterfall bad, agile good. That's the idea. Let's explore it a little.

Waterfall is always associated with Winston W Royce (1929-95) and, to hear people talking about waterfall these days, you'd think he was a bit of an idiot. Actually, he was a rocket scientist who got into large-scale software engineering and ended up running IT for Lockheed.

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall 2

They spend about £700 billion of our money every year, much of it wasted. Whitehall's mandarins exercise the prerogatives previously reserved to Stuart kings. Their harlot power is jealously guarded, while all responsibility is taken by more or less hapless ministers. Challenges come and go. They're usually seen off, the politicians give up and we the public carry on paying.

You may as well know that the whiff is back, there is once again cordite in Whitehall. Francis Maude thinks that if ministers are to take responsibility, then they really ought to have some say in which officials manage the political initiatives and the associated budgets. The Guardian has the story – Ministers to be given say in civil service appraisals. So does Public Servant magazine – Ministers are to manage the Civil Service:

Maude's preference now is that ministers be involved in Civil Service appraisals and be given powers to hire and fire staff. And expert advice on how to ensure maximum efficiency should be sought from beyond Britain's shores if necessary.

Francis Maude v. the massed ranks of the senior civil service?

Good luck, Mr Maude.

The whiff of cordite in Whitehall 2

They spend about £700 billion of our money every year, much of it wasted. Whitehall's mandarins exercise the prerogatives previously reserved to Stuart kings. Their harlot power is jealously guarded, while all responsibility is taken by more or less hapless ministers. Challenges come and go. They're usually seen off, the politicians give up and we the public carry on paying.

You may as well know that the whiff is back, there is once again cordite in Whitehall. Francis Maude thinks that if ministers are to take responsibility, then they really ought to have some say in which officials manage the political initiatives and the associated budgets. The Guardian has the story – Ministers to be given say in civil service appraisals. So does Public Servant magazine – Ministers are to manage the Civil Service:

Maude's preference now is that ministers be involved in Civil Service appraisals and be given powers to hire and fire staff. And expert advice on how to ensure maximum efficiency should be sought from beyond Britain's shores if necessary.

Francis Maude v. the massed ranks of the senior civil service?

Good luck, Mr Maude.

ChristmasList: Misfeasance in public office

It was Christmas day in the harem,
The eunuchs were standing round [that's us, the public, we're the eunuchs],
And hundreds of beautiful women [or, at least, £710 billion of our money]
Were stretched out on the ground,
When in strode the bold bad sultan [or mandarin, Sir Gus O'Donnell]
And stared at his marble halls [or Whitehall]:
"What do you want for Christmas, boys?"
And the eunuchs answered tidings of comfort and joy
[viz. charges of misfeasance in public office
being brought against various satraps
e.g. Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS]

ChristmasList: Misfeasance in public office

It was Christmas day in the harem,
The eunuchs were standing round [that's us, the public, we're the eunuchs],
And hundreds of beautiful women [or, at least, £710 billion of our money]
Were stretched out on the ground,
When in strode the bold bad sultan [or mandarin, Sir Gus O'Donnell]
And stared at his marble halls [or Whitehall]:
"What do you want for Christmas, boys?"
And the eunuchs answered tidings of comfort and joy
[viz. charges of misfeasance in public office
being brought against various satraps
e.g. Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS]

PerishTheThought: the public interest 2

In view of the impending retirement of Sir Gus O'Donnell, Sir Richard Mottram conducted a review of Whitehall and identified seven abiding problems, problems which existed before the advent of Sir Gus and which persist still.

One of those problems is for the Cabinet Office to take control of the big departments of state, which currently operate as autonomous fiefdoms or over-powerful satrapies, way beyond the control of politicians and beyond the control even of Sir Gus:

... the coalition government has given increasing priority to improving the efficiency of the civil service and the wider public service under a Cabinet Office group ...

On 21 November 2011, Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, gave a speech on The Crown and suppliers: a new way of working. Mr Maude considers several ways in which Whitehall makes procurement too difficult. Among others, he lights on the use of management consultants:

... too often in the past we have defaulted into a comfort zone of hiring external consultants to run any kind of complex procurements. This has two effects. It reduces the need and ability for public officials to develop the necessary skills. And it can happen that consultants being paid on day rates have no incentive to get procurements finished speedily, nor to drive simplicity. Far too many procurements feature absurdly over-prescriptive requirements. We should be procuring on the basis of the outcomes and outputs we seek ...

This practice of hiring management consultants has been followed "too often" to be in the public interest. What's the minister going to do about it?

... we will ensure that in future we focus on outputs and outcomes. And we now forbid the use of consultants in central government procurements without my express agreement.

Forbid? Express agreement? Let's hope so. The minister is quite right. But will the other departments of state seek his permission to hire management consultants? And abide by his decision to forbid it? Can Maude make it stick?

Francis "Glendower" Maude: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Sir Humphrey (shame it's not Percy) "Hotspur" Appleby: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

That is the question.

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Hat tips: Tony Collins, W Shakespeare

PerishTheThought: the public interest 2

In view of the impending retirement of Sir Gus O'Donnell, Sir Richard Mottram conducted a review of Whitehall and identified seven abiding problems, problems which existed before the advent of Sir Gus and which persist still.

PerishTheThought: the public interest 1

Sir Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office and Head of the home civil service, gave evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee on 23 November 2011. No transcript available yet but, according to the Guardian:

The Freedom of Information act is a mistake, and is having a negative effect on governing, Britain's top civil servant said. Sir Gus O'Donnell told the Commons public administration select committee that it had stymied full and frank discussion of options by ministers and others in government. The 2001 act gives members of the public and journalists the right to ask for publication of official documents. "The problem is, virtually everything [in such documents] is subject to a public interest test. If asked to give advice, I'd say I can't guarantee they can say without fear or favour if they disagree with something, and that information will remain private. Because there could be an FoI request. "It's having a very negative impact on the freedom of policy discussions."

What possible interest could we the public have in how the unelected Sir Gus, or his unaccountable office, spends £710 billion of our money for us this year?

Whitehall often claim, as here in front of the Public Administration Select Committee, that they couldn't do their job properly if they had to operate in the open. They couldn't serve the public interest.

Whitehall do not operate in the open at the moment. Their deliberations go largely unreported. And yet, despite the putative benefit of this secrecy, when their performance is reported, mostly by the National Audit Office, after the event, all too often, it transpires that Whitehall aren't doing their job properly.

It transpires that, too often, Whitehall has become an irresponsible and unbusinesslike and undignified machine for transferring public money to a small group of management consultants, contractors and PFI financiers, against the public interest.

Pace Sir Gus, secrecy is not working. Sir Gus is wrong. The smug technocrat's insider view that Whitehall is currently doing a good job is untenable, mendacious, self-deception. Looking in from the outside, Whitehall seems regularly to be guilty of misfeasance in public office.

Openness might be part of the answer. Openness might help Whitehall to do its job properly. Openness might be in the public interest.

PerishTheThought: the public interest 1

Sir Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office and Head of the home civil service, gave evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee on 23 November 2011. No transcript available yet but, according to the Guardian:

The Freedom of Information act is a mistake, and is having a negative effect on governing, Britain's top civil servant said. Sir Gus O'Donnell told the Commons public administration select committee that it had stymied full and frank discussion of options by ministers and others in government. The 2001 act gives members of the public and journalists the right to ask for publication of official documents. "The problem is, virtually everything [in such documents] is subject to a public interest test. If asked to give advice, I'd say I can't guarantee they can say without fear or favour if they disagree with something, and that information will remain private. Because there could be an FoI request. "It's having a very negative impact on the freedom of policy discussions."

What possible interest could we the public have in how the unelected Sir Gus, or his unaccountable office, spends £710 billion of our money for us this year?

Whitehall – misfeasance in public office

Dame Helen Ghosh has been Permanent Secretary at the Home Office since 1 January 2011. Before her, it was Sir David Normington. And before him, it was Sir John Gieve who signed the accounts.

On 21 July 2006, the Times published Accounts for Home Office adrift by trillions:

A National Audit Office review of transactions carried out on the Home’s Office’s financial IT system found problems with the data. “When the gross transaction value of debits and credits within this data was totalled, they each amounted to £26,527,108,436,994: almost 2,000 times higher than the Home Office’s gross expenditure for 2004-05 and approximately one and a half times higher than the estimated gross domestic product of the entire planet,” a note from the National Audit Office said. “This suggests something has gone seriously awry. We have yet to receive an explanation for what has happened,” the note added. Last night Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the [Public Accounts Committee], said: “In any parish council or cricket club the person responsible would have been out on his ear. What actually happened was that Sir John was promoted to become Deputy Governor of the Bank of England in charge of financial stability in the banking system. “You might reasonably expect to see this in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but not in real life.”

Make the most of any smile that brought to your lips.

On 11 November 2011, the National Audit Office published HM Revenue & Customs – The expansion of online filing of tax returns.

Unpromising material, granted. It repays attention nonetheless.

All of HMRC's IT to handle tax returns is supplied under contract. The contract is called ASPIRE and the contractors are Capgemini and Fujitsu. ASPIRE is worth £8 billion over 10 years. The NAO are talking about how HMRC spends 8,000 million of our pounds. Under the heading Operational performance, they say (pp.8-9):

HMRC uses a range of indicators to measure the performance of its ICT services, which include online services, and it measures availability that relates specifically to online filing. HMRC has a high-level view of the overall costs of ICT provision through the ASPIRE contract. It has been taking steps to improve that information and achieve cost savings. It does not yet have a detailed breakdown of the costs of online filing services, so it cannot benchmark those costs to assess their value for money. HMRC is currently negotiating with the ASPIRE contractors to obtain a clearer breakdown of the costs of ICT services provided.

What are the NAO telling us?

For anyone who missed it, the NAO provide a second chance (p.11) when they say that HMRC ...

... should proceed with its plans to identify ICT costs specific to online filing services and ensure that current negotiations with the ASPIRE contractors provide sufficient breakdown of cost information for regular benchmarking of costs.

HMRC has "a high-level view of the overall costs" of IT but not "a detailed breakdown". The contractors won't give them a detailed breakdown. HMRC are having to negotiate with the contractors to get a detailed breakdown. HMRC don't know what they're getting for our money. They just keep paying. The contractors don't tell HMRC what they're invoicing for. They just keep demanding money. Lots of money. £8,000,000,000 of our money.

This isn't Gilbert and Sullivan. This is Mario Puzo.

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The exegesis above is due to Tony Collins, investigative journalist and hero.

He reminisces about an earlier incidence of this irresponsible, unbusinesslike, spineless, craven, beholden behaviour of Whitehall's:

Several years ago the Conservative MP Richard Bacon asked criminal justice officials for a breakdown of costs on the “Libra” contract for magistrates’ courts IT. The Department didn’t know. So it referred Bacon to Fujitsu, Libra’s main supplier. Fujitsu eventually provided a breakdown so vague – with high-level categories such as “network services” – that Bacon had little choice but to ask the same questions repeatedly to find out how public funds were being spent with Fujitsu. In the end Bacon failed – and he had little support from departmental officials.

It's an ugly and horrifying subject that no-one wants to dwell on. Which may be why Mr Collins forgets another case he himself reported, the case of the NHS's £11 billion+ NPfIT contract:

I understand that when auditors carried out a check at NHS Connecting for Health they found box-loads of invoices that had not been analysed. Auditors found that the invoices were being paid as they came in, without a reconciliation of what was being charged against what was being delivered, and without a check on the extent to which payments related to sign-off of systems by local trusts.

Richard Bacon MP, hero, has been active on all three projects – Libra, NPfIT and ASPIRE – together with Tony Collins, trying to get value for money for the public and, so far, failing.

Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General at the NAO, is unearthing tons of evidence of negligence.

Whitehall says it's doing nothing illegal, which may be true, but it's not the responsible behaviour we have a right to expect and, for the moment, the money keeps pouring out of the bucket and into the pockets of the contractors and the management consultants and the PFI financiers.

Nothing illegal? Is there a lawyer in the house? Is there a case here to bring charges of misfeasance in public office?

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Updated 8 November 2013:

DWP untouched by MPs’ criticisms over Universal Credit IT project
Did DWP mislead MPs and media over Universal Credit?
DWP cover-up over Universal Credit IT project?
More IT-based megaprojects derail amid claims all is well

Updated 9 November 2015

Police funding sums are totally wrong, Home Office admits Police and crime commissioners accused the Home Office of being unable to add up after a senior civil servant admitted that the wrong data was applied in its planned overhaul of the way in which cash grants are distributed to the 43 forces in England and Wales ... In the case of Scotland Yard, the Home Office grant estimate was said to be wrong by more than £100 million ... Andrew White, the chief executive of Devon and Cornwall’s PCC office, uncovered the discrepancies after his own analysts were unable to make the Home Office figures add up. He said that he received a letter admitting the mistake yesterday from Mary Callum, the director-general for crime and policing ...

After signing the £26½ trillion Home Office accounts (please see above) Sir John Gieve went on to become a Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Can Mary Callum follow this tradition?


Updated 13.4.16

UK borders safe?

A dutiful Whitehall under the political control of Westminster?

High standards of misfeasance maintained, particularly at the Home Office:

Top civil servant kicked out of Parliament committee for 'unsatisfactory' answers to MPs A senior Whitehall mandarin refused to say whether the UK Border Force budget has been cut – before being kicked out of a hearing with MPs for giving "unsatisfactory" answers. Oliver Robbins was threatened with being held in contempt and repeatedly criticised when he side-stepped a string of questions put to him by the home affairs select committee. Mr Robbins, the Home office second permanent secretary, was asked nine times by Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, whether the borders budget had been finalised, without receiving an answer. Twenty minutes later Mr Robbins was told to leave the session ...

Updated 29.6.16

Permanent Secretary appointed to lead the new EU unit in Cabinet Office 29 June 2016 Oliver Robbins has been appointed as the head of the new EU Unit in the Cabinet Office. Oliver will have responsibility for supporting Cabinet in the examination of options for our future relationship outside the EU, with Europe, and the rest of the world as well as responsibility for the wider European and Global Issues Secretariat ... Mark Sedwill, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, said: "... I can think of no better person to lead this work than Oliver Robbins, who, in the past year as Second Permanent Secretary for borders, immigration and citizenship, has made such a positive impact in the department, and developed considerable expertise in many of the issues central to negotiating British withdrawal and establishing a new position in the world".

Let's hope that Mr Robbins will be a little more forthcoming than he was with the Home Affairs Committee.

Whitehall – misfeasance in public office

Dame Helen Ghosh has been Permanent Secretary at the Home Office since 1 January 2011. Before her, it was Sir David Normington. And before him, it was Sir John Gieve who signed the accounts.

On 21 July 2006, the Times published Accounts for Home Office adrift by trillions:

A National Audit Office review of transactions carried out on the Home’s Office’s financial IT system found problems with the data. “When the gross transaction value of debits and credits within this data was totalled, they each amounted to £26,527,108,436,994: almost 2,000 times higher than the Home Office’s gross expenditure for 2004-05 and approximately one and a half times higher than the estimated gross domestic product of the entire planet,” a note from the National Audit Office said. “This suggests something has gone seriously awry. We have yet to receive an explanation for what has happened,” the note added. Last night Richard Bacon, a Conservative member of the [Public Accounts Committee], said: “In any parish council or cricket club the person responsible would have been out on his ear. What actually happened was that Sir John was promoted to become Deputy Governor of the Bank of England in charge of financial stability in the banking system. “You might reasonably expect to see this in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, but not in real life.”

Make the most of any smile that brought to your lips.

Less for more

First Katie worked for James and Ian. Then Ian left and so did Katie. When James left as well, Katie stopped working for Ian and went to work for James. Then James left and Sarah took over. There was no room for Katie so she went back to working for Ian. Until Christine left and now Katie finds herself working for David. Or is it the other way around? Will Ian's will prevail? Just how much are we paying CSC? And for what? How did the Daily Mail get themselves suckered? And where does Andrew come into it?

All of that and more – including Sir Anthony Blunt – in the latest edition of the long-running programme, Whitehall in control ...

Like a lot of people in Whitehall, Katie Davis used to be a partner at Accenture.

She left in 2005 to join the Cabinet Office, home also to Ian Watmore at the time. Mr Watmore, of course, is a former managing director of Accenture.

In 2007 she moved to the Identity & Passport Service (IPS), where she was appointed Executive Director of Strategy. After three years of her strategy, IPS imploded. They left their offices at Globe House and retreated to the Home Office mother ship in Marsham St. The Chief Executive, James Hall, previously a managing partner of Accenture, retired and was replaced by Sarah Rapson, never worked for Accenture, ex-American Express, MBA from the London Business School.

Five directors of the IPS board were cleared out at the same time and so it came to pass that Katie found herself back in the Cabinet Office with the title Executive Director, Operational Excellence, working for Ian Watmore's Efficiency & Reform Group (ERG, previously OGC). The quiet life of operational excellence there beckoned but was soon rudely interrupted when Christine left.

Christine Connelly was the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Health. She was for years the most articulate and impassioned supporter of NPfIT, the NHS's £11 billion+ National Programme for IT. In June 2011, she resigned.

There had been a few problems.

By this stage in the career of NPfIT, there were only two contractors left. Accenture had pulled out with losses of over $450 million. Fujitsu also had pulled out, and are still thinking of suing HMG for £700 million. Leaving only BT and CSC.

CSC – Computer Sciences Corporation – are an American software house. They took over Accenture's NPfIT contracts. As part of the deal, they inherited iSoft, the software house that developed Lorenzo, the package on which NPfIT depends.

iSoft got into financial problems. The market took a dim view of their habit of booking profits based on nothing more than vague promises that someone might at some stage in the future possibly buy a copy of Lorenzo or not. CSC had to take them over to keep them afloat.

Lorenzo continued to perform badly, causing CSC to miss certain important milestones in their delivery plan for NPfIT. What with that, and a minor misunderstanding in the US with the Armed Services Board which cost them $250 million, their shareholders were getting edgy and CSC asked Christine Connelly to sign a contract guaranteeing them £3 billion. They also offered a discount. How about we take 25% off the price, CSC asked, but only deliver 50% of the services?

Less for more. An attractive proposition as anyone would agree.

At least, Christine Connelly thought it was attractive and she was minded to sign. Not so fast, said Richard Bacon MP, a hero. Not so fast, said Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, a hero. Not so fast, said, Ian Watmore, Chief Operating Officer of ERG, whose motto, devised by Lord Brown of Madingley, Chairman of ERG and previously Chairman of BP and the Gulf of Mexico, is "more for less".

Even David Cameron asked Ms Connelly to stay her hand. For months, it looked as though, with the support of her boss, Sir David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS, she was going to tell the lot of them to take a running jump. A power which, it may come as a surprise to those who believe we live in a polity where politicians control Whitehall, she had. Then she was gone.

Had Ian Watmore at last managed to assert his authority over the Department of Health? Who knows. But one way and another, Christine Connelly was replaced by Katie Davis.

That was back in June. On 22 September 2011, the Daily Mail carried this front page headline:

£12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain

Their heart was in the right place but the story was false. The Department of Health agree that NPfIT has a few problems (mutt) but according to Sir David Nicholson, to paraphrase, we all owe our very existence to the genius of NPfIT (jeff), which will go on. And on. Until we've spent all the money we're entitled to. And then we may need some more. Firm up on that one later.

This is Sir Gus O'Donnell's Whitehall. He has been head of the home civil service since 2005. He leaves at the end of the year. We shall miss his deft organisational powers. Public administration in the UK may never be the same again. With any luck. GOD retires from top job – to be replaced by a new trinity, as they say in yesterday's Times newspaper.

Talking of which, when the Times look at NPfIT, they say:

The history of the NHS computer system is one of criminal incompetence and irresponsibility

Whereas when Sir David looks at it, he says:

We spent about 20% of that resource [the £11.4bn projected total spend on the NPfIT] on the acute sector. The other 80% is providing services that literally mean life and death to patients today, and have done for the last period. So the Spine, and all those things, provides really, really important services for our patients. If you are going to talk about the totality of the [NPfIT] system … you have to accept that 80% of that programme has been delivered.

Sir Anthony Blunt was the world expert on Poussin. Standing in front of an obvious fake once, he declared it to be authentic. Why? Perhaps Sir David Nicholson could tell us.

The quotation immediately above is due to Tony Collins, the award-winning investigative journalist, one of the few people on the planet who know what's going on NPfIT-wise, and a hero. Andrew Lansley? Admittedly Secretary of State for Health but, when it comes right down to it, just a politician. Not sure. Katie Davis?  At least she's sort of a mandarin and a former Executive Director of Operational Excellence, but even so – not sure.

The sun never sets on Sir David's empire. Now a group of American investors are suing CSC in a class action. They clearly don't think Lorenzo is kosher either, any more than Richard Bacon, Margaret Hodge et al. Somehow, mysteriously, the shareholders have got hold of internal CSC reports going back to May 2008 saying that Lorenzo could never meet the NHS's requirements and that the package is on a "death march".

Not the sort of march you want a health service to be on. But then what has any of this £11 billion of public money got to do with health?

Less for more

First Katie worked for James and Ian. Then Ian left and so did Katie. When James left as well, Katie stopped working for Ian and went to work for James. Then James left and Sarah took over. There was no room for Katie so she went back to working for Ian. Until Christine left and now Katie finds herself working for David. Or is it the other way around? Will Ian's will prevail? Just how much are we paying CSC? And for what? How did the Daily Mail get themselves suckered? And where does Andrew come into it?

All of that and more – including Sir Anthony Blunt – in the latest edition of the long-running programme, Whitehall in control ...