3Project management and governance
10.The Department attributed the problems with this project to the fact that NHS IC “did not have the capabilities, the skill set or the approach to technology projects that one needs to have to make them successful. It was not a technology organisation; it was a data statistics organisation.”13 Lacking the relevant expertise NHS IC had hired a lot of contractors rather than permanent staff which had resulted in a lot of staff turnover14. This included ten different project managers over five years, six of whom had been employees and four had been contractors.15 The Department told us that one of the reasons for creating HSCIC had been to bring together data and technology in one organisation to ensure IT projects could be professionally managed and properly led.16
11.We asked the Department who the GPES project managers would have reported to within the Department of Health. We were told that they would have reported to a programme board within the Department which oversaw the GPES project and was chaired by a director from the Department. However, there was also significant staff turnover on the Board which had three chairs in three years.17 We asked the Department who was responsible for signing off the flawed Atos software. The Department told us that normally this would have been the responsibility of the programme board, but in this case a sub-committee of the board had been formed, which recommended the sign-off to the overall programme. The Department and HSCIC told us that no one in the Department, NHS IC or HSCIC had been disciplined or held responsible for the failure of this project.18 The Accounting Officer for NHS IC when it accepted GPES from Atos was NHS IC’s Chief Executive, who then ceased his employment with NHS IC and did not continue with the new Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC); he was awarded total emoluments of £470,000 for the financial year 2012–2013 including a redundancy payment of £330,000.
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Prepared 21 December 2015