Today's Sunday Times leads with a story telling us that 'A COMPUTER project costing £6.2 billion that is central to Tony Blair’s National Health Service reforms is in “grave” danger of being “derailed”... '
Why? The senior civil servant in charge puts the root cause down to too many last minute changes:
- In the e-mail exchanges in September, Granger blames a senior civil servant in the Department of Health for the fiasco, criticising her repeated last-minute changes and failure to heed his advice.
- Granger censures Margaret Edwards, the department’s director for access and patient choice, for adding numerous new specifications to the booking programme
- He concludes: “Unfortunately, your consistently late requests will not enable us to rescue the missed opportunities and targets.”
- Granger complains that the project has been allowed to change beyond recognition from the original specification. "The original request from your predecessor and yourself was for an Electronic Booking System. The change of this to Choose and Book occurred in (the second quarter of) 2003. This was the first of what are now recurrent major changes in your requirements."
Well, there's a suprise: they couldn't get the specifications right up front and so they had lot's of last minute changes. This is THE big problem with the waterfall method and it was the basis of my MBA dissertation. And, it's the exact problem that the Agile methods solve: you can't prevent change, so embrace it.
