Throwing Bad Money after Bad
Martyn Walmsley
I've transformed weekly releases into multiple daily releases in regulated FinTechs, becoming ISO27001 certified at the same time. What can I do for you?
The UK government, in the person of Business minister Kevin Hollinrake MP, has offered ￡600,000 in settlement to individuals impacted by the Project Horizon scandal.
I believe this represents "throwing bad money after bad" as it is, for many, a derisory amount of money for the suffering individuals have had to endure.
Project Horizon, for those who do not know, was the development and roll out of a new system for managing sales and the accounting of those sales in UK post office branches. It was the biggest non-military IT project in Europe. It cost over ￡1 billion to install and affected 18,000 post offices throughout the UK. (Hansard debate record), with the contract for development and supply being awarded in 1996, please note the date.
The faulty software and management failures which allowed its release have resulted in
The emotional and psychological impacts of these convictions and other life events is incalculable, with lives and livelihoods ruined and generational impacts on families.?
However, the compensation bill under the 3 schemes put in place by the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry had already amounted to ￡99.04m by April 6th 2023 as per the report to the House of Commons (Paragraphs 128, 129 on page 30).
By the start of 2025, the compensation schemes had paid out ￡364M and Post Office legal fees had risen to ￡136M. A total of ￡500,000,000 and rising. Please read that number again and let it sink in. Avoidable financial costs, as I share below.
By any measure the impact of faulty software on the lives and businesses concerned has been vast and could have been avoided. Offering a settlement of ￡600,000 to those impacted, to the eyes of many trying to 'buy off' those whose claims are yet to be heard under the compensation schemes, is truly bad and is what represents "Throwing Bad Money After Bad".
I say that these?costs are avoidable with confidence from personal experience. I was working for a software development company in 1994 where our business was struggling due to the poor quality of the software we were supplying. In large part this was due to us not truly understanding what customers were asking of us and not taking the time internally to ensure that those responsible for delivery of the software had the right information to be successful.?
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Under the leadership of Dick Holland, we introduced Tom Gilb and Dorothy Graham 's Software Inspection process which resulted in a 70% reduction in major defects over an 18 month period to September 1996 (remember that date). The process metrics we gathered included:
Software Inspection was assessed in David Rico's 2004 book on Software Process Improvements as delivering over 3200% ROI compared to 173% for the CMMI method, often cited as the leading methodology. Our experience aligned with that.
The costs and impacts of Project Horizon were preventable as the methods to prevent them existed before the contract for delivery was awarded. I have been passionate about defect prevention, rather than detection and rectification, since 1994 when Tom taught us Software Inspection which is why I am so incensed by the derisory offer which has prompted me to share my thoughts here.
Software development lifecycle and design methodologies, systems architectures and team topologies have changed across the organisations I've worked at since. The underlying fundamental of deeply understanding the customer's needs across the delivery team to prevent issues later has not.
If this is something you, your team, your company are struggling with, contact me, I'd love to have a chat.
#qualityassurance #qualityengineering #quality #softwaredevelopment #testing #testers #lean #productivity
Barrister, Cambridge, LSE
1 年Excellent post. Thanks.
Inventor of 'Planguage', Consultant, Methods Inventor, Textbook Writer, Keynote Speaker and Teacher to many international organizations
1 年people do not seem to care about discovering their defects early, like in inspections and requirements. You could say there is no incentive. sad"
Communications Director with corporate and political experience
1 年Oh -and the ￡600,000 is in my view a diversion -to make the optics on a very bad situation look better for a Goveernment owned Post Office. Talk about incompetence! Very few postmasters can even apply for it because convicted SPMs are not allowed any compensation. The majority have not even reached appeal stage, and the snails pace of the Criminal Complaints Review Commission means that more postmasters could go to their graves (as over 33 have already) before receiving any compensation. My maiden name is Rosie Brocklehurst , married name Franczak. I am a retired journalist and PRO.
Communications Director with corporate and political experience
1 年So good that you have written to NAO. The assumption was that Horizon was robust and the magistrates and judges who convicted SPMs just took it for granted that the system could not make errors and that Fujitsu could not access SPMs terminals remotely! That was from 1998-2019 and the Justice Fraser Common Issues case. Post Office Ltd (POL) managers hid the fact that 15000 calls were made by SPMs to the help desks about errors and shortfalls appearing time and again. The Post Office contract forced SPMs to be liable for any shortfall . Some who were fearful paid money that they did not owe from borrowings on credit cards and were still suspended and prosecuted.
Mostly Retired
1 年Spot on, Martin. Thanks for sharing your own stats from Inspection. I sometimes wonder why people seem to think that Inspection is "too expensive" to implement, with success stories like yours to prove that it's far more expensive not to. The damage done by those in power who refused to see the evidence provided by the "little people", the sub-postmasters, is inhumane, cruel and continuing. I hope that anyone who hears about this will never again think that a computer system could be infallible.