Duncan

Although you haven’t got access to the material we have, you do actually get to the some of the core issues highlighted.

Specifically: a major function of the British state (visas and immigration) “transitioned” in early 2014, and the transition caused chaos (this is borne out in the email chain). Immediately after this, GDS then held an inquest into what went wrong, using an external anthropologist. This amounts to 8MB of material – including all the field notes. For whatever reasons, management did not incorporate the lessons from the earlier transitions into the HMRC transition. You say yourself “it’s an embarrassing mess”.

That, in a nutshell, is what we reported. One or two of your assertions here aren’t justified by the evidence. For example:

“Staff at HMRC appear to have felt threatened by the change.”

I’m not sure what you base this on, but it’s not an allegation I could find made by any GDS staff in the UKVI post-mortem. There appear to be no perceived “threat” – both sides worked very hard to try and make the new UKVI work. And as we say, there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

GDS management and comms team likes to throw this assertion around a lot, usually on an unattributable basis. It implies bad faith on the part of people they need to be working with. It helps “position” GDS as a positive progressive force, fighting regressive entrenched interests. I’d take it with a bag of salt.

The key thing is that lessons were not learned and the same mistakes that bedevilled UKVI’s transition were repeated in the HMRC transition. Perhaps GDS is an institution not capable of learning from mistakes. Perhaps it is not capable of even recognising the mistakes as mistakes. We shall see.

“For instance, it is legitimate to ask if the agile approach is appropriate for a government website — or indeed for content as opposed to software.”

That is a very good question, but not one we can begin to answer without more data. It is worth noting that GDS staff at the coal face did not consider Gov.uk an “agile” project. Whatever the intentions (and quantity of Post It notes used). You are spot on that this was really a publishing project as much as anything.

You correctly highlight that HMRC’s transition failed to meet the needs of specialists, such as accountants. This is a key point. But GDSalso failed to meet the needs of “general users” too. People just like you.

For example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/20/uks_tax_website_is_a_nightmare_but_it_could_have_been_even_worse/?page=2

Why doesn’t the Self Assessment page refer to Capital Gains tax, alongside Income Tax? The omission implies that either the CGT form is part of a different process, or is not required at all for self-assessed taxpayers. That’s a catastrophic omission.

(via Twitter) “If Gov.uk is to be perceived as a failure, there doesn’t seem much bloody point in trying to make a good website any more.”

This is quite an emotive response. Why can GDS not learn from the lessons? Can anyone? The failings of the transitions to Gov.UK seem to me a publishing and content management failure as much as anything.