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Neil Williams wrote:
Government should stop moving the goal posts. The first reason the pharmacy side of the NHS IT scheme has gone so far over budget is that the entire basis of the mechanisms and protocols were abandoned and then redesigned time and time again.
Who/what was/were the driver for those changes?
Government doesn't understand Agile programming
Government doesn't understand anything, except in a Chinese Rooms way of thinking. Even then Government isn't a homogeneous entity.
For example they are working on improving code sharing and experience in local government currently, but local government is a long way from Whitehall a lot of the time.
I think the government understand project management as a Prince II thing, and where this is followed, and done by people who understand the methodology, you often get reasonable project management, and thus reasonable software projects.
Where I see it go wrong, if where work is outsourced, or where the project is not well understood (the current NHS system is a case in point, I know someone who was managing a subproject for something it wasn't even clear was technically possible), or the project management is inexperienced. All these were visible to me in the current big NHS project, and I only happened to know a few people who worked on bits of the project socially.
Parts of the CCTA understands this -- that would be the place to start to see what sort of advice government has and needs. They are now OGC.
Free software methods....
The Government would need a more detail than "free software methods". Also, I'm not sure that Free software methods are that efficient alone.There are aspects to free software, that make it more efficient. For example the Savannah/Freshmeat/source-forge model, isn't as obvious aspect, one could write "make all Goverment software GPL'ed" and achieve little without proper tools for sharing, collaboration etc.
There are also social aspects that affect how things work. Debian being a good example of a group that self organised, imposed their own quality control on contributors, own decision making model. But that model probably couldn't be used in government easily, if only because the potential pool of direct contributors would be smaller, and there would be external pressures to do things particular ways.
If someone is seriously listening, we can dig out the people who have written their thesis on these things. They aren't hard to find, as most of them have spoken to the FSF at some point. I dare say Mr M Lee, formerly of DCGLUG, could name most of them by return of email.
Simon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html