"In addition, the reliance on the programme director’s delivery experience represented a significant ‘single point of failure’ risk to delivery."
While the PDP took steps to address some of these issues, including hiring a head of technology development, the Department for Work and Pensions did its own mock assessment in July 2022 and found that the PDP did not meet 12 out of 14 service standards.
The NAO report says the IPA, which reviewed this assessment, found: "There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at that stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable; the project may need rescoping and/or its overall viability reassessed."
A later review by the DWP found, in February 2023, five major issues with the PDP:
- A lack of resources at the PDP, with the necessary skills and resources at the PDP.
- Ineffective and complex programme governance.
- A lack of a robust contract management regime.
- A lack of appropriate technical and test assurance of the digital architecture.
- Delays in addressing several priority recommendations made by the IPA in July 2022.
To its credit, Maps highlighted two major risks in October 2022 to the DWP on the delivery of the programme: a lack of skilled resources and commercial issues.
Firstly, says the NAO report, "Maps's small digital function meant it had limited resilience to staff turnover in this area. The PDP also had specialist roles that did not exist elsewhere in Maps.
"This, coupled with limits on the reward it could offer for specialist roles, meant it had been unable to fill vacancies in the programme team for a sustained period."
And then secondly: "Maps’s contract with Capgemini [the sub-contractor building the digital architecture] had constraints that hampered Maps’s ability to oversee effectively the design and delivery of the digital architecture."
The structure of the project management had consequences that "resulted in Capgemini not delivering some aspects of the architecture to the standard expected, prompting Maps to retain two payments in 2022."
So what are the conclusions drawn by the NAO?
It appears to be raising questions over how the DWP managed its relationship with Maps, and indeed in choosing Maps itself as the main organisation to develop a new piece of pensions infrastructure.
The report says: "DWP identified that, in choosing an arm’s-length body as its delivery mechanism, it needs to give consideration to the maturity and stability of the body. In the case of the PDP, Maps had been recently formed from three pre-existing organisations when it took responsibility for PDP delivery."
Earlier in the report, the NAO sets out DWP's reasoning: "DWP told us that it did not have capacity itself to take on the programme and considered that using Maps would allow work to start sooner than if it had to create a new body for this purpose.
