On 11 September 2013, the most senior civil servant at Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions sat before Parliament’s spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee. The subject was Universal Credit, the department’s plan to fold six means-tested benefits into one. A committee member summed up what he had heard: the programme had tried “agile,” a method that “had never really been done at this scale before,” and now, he said, it had gone back to the old way. “In effect, they have ripped it up and started again.”
“I don’t think that that is what she said, with respect,” the permanent secretary replied. The “she” was the interim director general of the government’s Major Projects Authority, who was also giving evidence. She explained that the programme was now using agile for some parts and a traditional approach for others. “It is not an issue of methodology,” she said. “It is an issue of the rigour and discipline that is applied to those approaches.” At the time, around 2,500 people were claiming Universal Credit. The department’s target was 184,000 by April 2014.
The department had chosen agile in late 2010. According to the National Audit Office, agile let it start building before the policy was finished. The department estimated that the traditional approach, finishing the policy first and then building the systems, could not deliver Universal Credit before April 2015, and it aimed for national roll-out in October 2013. It couldn’t tell the auditors why it had picked that date. When the NAO surveyed government agile projects in 2012, Universal Credit, at £2.2 billion, was the largest. The 24 such projects at other government bodies cost £25.7 million in total.
What the auditors found looked little like small teams shipping working software. The programme grew to over 1,000 people, using “an approach that is often used in small collaborative teams,” and hadn’t defined how it would track progress or record decisions. A review by PwC, reproduced by the NAO, found suppliers were paid for time and materials and that deliverables “were not always defined before contracts were signed.” On average, six project leads had three days to check 1,500 timesheets. The programme board could see how much IT work was being done, but not what that work was worth against what it cost. Reviews in 2012 found a “fortress mentality” in the programme team.
The department relaunched its method as “Agile 2.0” in January 2012. The Cabinet Office, the NAO reported, did not consider that the department had “at any point prior to the reset appropriately adopted an agile approach.” After a reset early in 2013, Universal Credit started at a single site, in Ashton-under-Lyne, taking only the simplest new claims. The department identified £34 million of the IT it had built that would have to be written off. The Public Accounts Committee’s verdict was blunt: management of the programme “has been extraordinarily poor.”