Mr Bates vs the Post Office

I know this is a long time after the event, but I really don’t understand how someone, high up in Post Office, didn’t put two and two together, when this new system was introduced, and ask why have all these sub-postmasters suddenly turned crooked, at exactly the same time.

It’s beyond belief.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
I've got a similar length in the IT industry to you, as a project manager and business analyst, and I'll go further.

In my 35 years, I've been lucky to work on some great projects. Six or seven major IT/Business transformation projects including two of the biggest and most ambitious in Western Europe. Never once have I seen a system implemented that didn't have initial problems of some sort.

Those might be bugs, requirements that were specified incorrectly or weren't specified at all, requirements that had to be dropped from scope in order to meet cost or time constraints, things that worked perfectly in the pre-production environment then failed in production. All sorts of reasons.

This week at my current company, we've just loaded the first mortgage case on our new platform but there's problems in a couple of areas, plus we need a host of manual processes to support that mortgage application through to completion and disbursement of the funds.

Last year I worked for the DWP, and was working on their payment system, one of the biggest in the world, when the Queen died. I wasn't involved in the 'London Bridge' operation but the colleague I worked with very closely was. They'd practiced that relentlessly, particularly as the late Queen got older. Because of the bank holiday being declared at short notice, we had to bring forward all payments that were due on that day or would be in BACS for payment on the next two days. When they finished and things got back to business as usual, she said there were things that had not worked that they hadn't considered in practice runs.

I've implemented a new system at 9am and had to take it down at 9:15am, as we still had a test table in there, rather than the production one. City's launch of digital tickets was another example that had loads of issues until they got on top of them.

I don't know what the implementation strategy was for Horizon but I'd expect a pilot roll-out to a small number of sub-post offices and careful monitoring, involving recording all transactions manually and reconciling those to the system. Partly because you're never sure what real users, who won't have the same experience, training or knowledge as the people who worked on it, are going to do.

There's no way a system as complex as Horizon was ever going to be perfect first time.
Click to expand...
 
I like your posts PB about City.

However, I will say this. We provide software for several nuclear establishments that cannot allow the results to be modified in anyway. The main manufacturers allow this. Make of that what you may.
 
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