Too much haste – not enough speed

Following my post on how to manage large projects, I’ve been reminded by one of my ex-managers of an example on the importance of the requirements stage – I’ll keep the names confidential to protect the.....

A few years ago, Radius was the leading supplier of applications in this specific area for local authorities – on the back of this we were invited to bid for a Central Government project to supply similar functionality. The competitive procurement was being managed by a major consultancy, but would be very quick – all suppliers were to be given just 7 working days to respond to the tender.

When the tender arrived, the requirements were obviously both incomplete and, in some places, plain wrong (some of the requirements even breached accounting rules). We knew that, as a small company with very little experience of working with Central Government, we were unlikely to win the business; so we decided (perhaps incorrectly) to take the high-risk approach of re-writing the requirements to include those areas that were obviously wrong or missing, and add options for some additional elements that users would normally need.

Our solution existed, could be piloted almost immediately, and could be put live in the few months required by the aggressive timetable - we bid a low price, but we admitted that the system would have to be re-engineered after a few years to meet vast transaction levels predicted in year 5 (something that we built into our project plan and costing). Our bid was rejected, primarily on its inability to meet the year 5 transaction levels. We never did find out officially who won the bid – the system didn’t go live as required a few months later – or even a few years later.....

Many months after the bid I spoke to one of the other bidders – again a supplier who had a working solution – they had also been ruled out (reputedly on price). He believed that the contract had been let to a major services organisation to develop from scratch against the original (flawed) statement of requirements, and that with extensions caused by changes in requirements identified after the contract had been signed, the Government had already paid out more than their original fixed price bid.

I’ve never been able to confirm whether that is true or not – certainly the system as initially specified never saw the light of day, and a stop-gap, partial solution was put in place several years later – a solution that has apparently never achieved the forecast transaction rates for year 2, let alone the suggested year 5 volumes....

Did the contractor pocket a 7-figure sum for his work on this failed project? And what happened to the Central Government sponsor (the project took over two years, so no doubt he had moved on before the project was marked as having failed)? The consultancy that managed the procurement is still a major services supplier to Central Government.

Whatever happened, it highlights the problems of rushing the all-important requirements stage – too much haste – not enough speed.....