New Capita system has left British Army recruits unable to register online

"I just don't understand, that's all"

Are you a politician or senior civil servant who hopes to get a directorship or two from an outsourcing company when you lose your seat or retire?

If not, that's why you don't understand.

Government has been about jobs for the boys for an immensely long time, since in fact before Caligula made his horse Consul for the year.

Did Capita take some North Korean funding?

Did C(r)apita take some Nork, Taleban or ISIS funding lately. If not, they probably can justify a funding round - they are doing a good job for that.

This is the kind of thing where the base functionality could be handed to the intern for a summer project if you wanted to just about get by or given to a team of proper devs for a month or two and they'd make it work properly.

And don't forget, they had a system that (sort of) worked before. It isn't even as though this is some new form of devilry that nobody understood. My guess as to HOW this fuck-up happened is that MoD previously outsourced their recruitment IT (or the entire process) to HPE or some predecessor ITinosaur, and to make extra shekels, the outsourcer sacked all the relatively expensive people who knew the system and the process as soon as they could under TUPE rules. Operationally HPE manned-down to a shed load of oppressed and over-worked minimum wage slaves, and as they didn't expect to retain the contract longer term, this slash and burn approach didn't matter. Then, when the Moronistry of Defence came to review the contract, yet again they went for the lowest tender, this time it was Crapita who were the most mendacious. Crapita waltzed in, planning to rinse-and-repeat the HPE effort after using the know-how people to build a new system (as you say, shouldn't take long) before sacking them, but this time it was a Mother Hubbard situation: When they got there, the cupboard was bare of people who understood either systems or processes.

@AzzZarr

upvoted!

This is the kind of thing where the base functionality could be handed to the intern for a summer project

I think you over-estimate the capacity of interns these days, ten years ago, yes, these days with young fellows of late, nope!

"Did the spec sheet get lost?"

The dog ate it!

"Did the armed forces forget to hand Capita the spec sheet? Did the spec sheet get lost?"

A few more questions. Did whoever drew up the spec sheet actually go to the potential users and ask what they wanted? Did Capita hand the spec sheet to the developers? Was the developers' native language that in which the spec was written (and that includes any military jargon used in it)? Did anyone actually think to let the developers show potential users early prototypes and get feedback? If anyone drew up a list of potential users as per above were they actual potential users or PHBs further up the food chain who'd never go near the actual S/W?

There are lots of ways for something like this to fail, to get it right you have to avoid them all.

Did the armed forces forget to hand Capita the spec sheet?

<snark>To save costs, Capita only had one member of the crew with the proper security clearance to read the spec.

Since he couldn't legally tell the others what the specs were, they just threw code together, then kept revising it based on whether he approved it or sent it back.

To further exacerbate the problem, he was let go halfway through, since the project was going over budget.

(The developer's budget from Capita, not Capita's budget from the military.)</snark>

Drupal 6, and not been updated since .. was it 2010?

Say no more.

Re: MoD as always

Having seen another IT contract go through the process what happens is:

1. Find out that due to some legislation, that I think may be based in EU law, you can't keep giving the contract to the company who've been providing a working service because you have to compete it at regular intervals or get sued.

2. Have a meeting where you discuss what you'd like the product to do, i.e. what the system you already have does plus a few extras that you were going to get if you stuck with it. Realise that the contract for the existing system ends before you can sensibly have a new one in place and task someone to find out how long you can reasonably extend the current contract without getting sued. Slip the project in service date right 18 months. This all happened at the first meeting, so in the space of two hours the programme had been delayed 18 months.

3. Put a hold on any improvements to the current system because that would give the incumbent an unfair advantage in the tendering process and could get the MoD sued.

4. All those nice extras you'd thought of? Start cutting them to stay within the budget. A budget that could extend the existing system about 18 years, or over three times the length of the contract you're tendering for.

5. Slip things right another six months because the invitation to tender hasn't been released yet. Get legal advice on if that could get MoD sued and get a firm 'maybe'.

6. Circulate list of three courses of action, one of which gets you the same capability you currently have, just, one of which gets you nothing, which would be illegal, and one of which gets MoD sued. Grudgingly accept COA 1.

I don't know how this ends as after three years they still haven't selected a winning bidder. But basically the problem is it's illegal not to put a government contract out for tender at regular intervals, even if what you've got is working perfectly.

So no one at Crapita knows how to write

Maybe not, but in this case it seems to me that the contract probably ASSUMED that adequate management information would be provided, or asked for it, but didn't define it. Crapita will (to the best of their meagre abilities) simply have stuck to the letter of the contract and spec. If nobody specifically asked for a recruitment count or other MI, then it won't have been built in.

But in so doing Crapita show what amateurs they are. Were I running Crapita, we'd have seen this omission, built in the code for the most fan-dabby-dozy MI suite cheaply at the time of code design and build (maybe even copy the spec from our own corporate systems), test it, then disable each finite element with a single asterisk. Then when MoD complain that the system doesn't do what they need but didn't ask for, we offer that which is asked for, charge the full variation order rate against an estimated design, code, test schedule, and simply release the code modified without that asterisk. Every item of bell and whistlery would be disabled separately, and only that which was requested and paid would be released, even though the code was already written.

select count(*) from applicants where date_of_application >= <this years recruitment start date>

or did someone forget to add the date of application into the table.

Or the Code assumed the date to be in British Format whereas the date format internally within the database was in American Format. And some developers catered for this difference and some didn't.

I've seen that before. Which is why on anything to do with dates I always start from the base date of 1/1/1970 (either format, of course) and then do anything with dates as Integers based on this. A pain but, oddly enough, everything that I have touched never got that wrong.

Re: 1.3B

Has anybody pointed out that is a years wages for over seven thousand infantrymen?

I say old chap, keep it all in perspective. In MoD terms, £1.3bn is only one failed Watchkeeper programme.

Perhaps we should add that to the El Reg units database?

Re: 1.3B

or enough to Crew Big lizzie and PoW, or enough to fuel the fleet, rather than leave the expensive grey things sitting in port....

How do these firms keep getting these cushy contracts?

You'll probably find that about 50% of the cost is management overhead (all those project managers sitting around drinking coffee are expensive and those pretty Gantt charts don't draw themselves y'know!).

30% is hardware (got to have the latest buzzword hardware!) and the remaining 20% gets spent on developer/analyst time.

And once that 20% is gone the product gets shipped. Regardless of the state it's in.

Re: How much? How long?

When will they learn outsourcing is not the cheaper option.

Only when all the flagpoles around the front entrance of Abbey Wood South are converted to gibbets, and each day a new senior civil servant is treated to the view from the top of each one.

@Terry 6

No, no, no, Crapita, with the r!

Where did the spec sheet go? did someone lose it?

Since the is the Armed Forces we're talking about, I expect a very senior officer left it on a train.