Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 16
16
The Department acknowledged that it has faced strong competition for people with the scarce technical...
Conclusion
The Department acknowledged that it has faced strong competition for people with the scarce technical skills required to deliver the programme, including from other government departments. The Department has now designed framework contracts with outside suppliers so that it is the responsibility of the suppliers to provide the right people with the right skills to support the programme.31 To support its skills base the programme has building the working relationship between the Department’s Digital, Data and Technology team and Border Force. The Department stated that this has improved the balance between the technical experts who understand the necessary system requirements and frontline staff who understand the user perspective. The Department is also attempting to improve civil service skills for the long-term.32 27 Qq 39, 40 28 Q 89 29 Q 59; C&AG’s Report, Digital Services at the Border Figure 12 30 Q 59; C&AG’s Report, Digital Services at the Border para 3.8 31 Q 66 32 Qq 66, 74 Digital Services at the Border 13 3 Delivering the reset programme The risk of late delivery
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
4: PAC conclusion: The Department has struggled to deliver the core technical components of the Digital Services at the Border programme. 4a: PAC recommendation: The Department should set out what it has done to resolve the problems it has had with the technical components of the programme and…… 4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented 4.2 The department has implemented agile working methodologies and has access to a specialist technical resource framework to acquire the right people for the right piece of work. The department has also ensured that: • the Border Crossing product has been migrated to a new more robust platform and refactored scalability to provide High availability; • the “secret data” (S*) side of the solution has been refactored and then re-imagined to overcome the technical issues of the first iteration; • logging and monitoring is deployed as standard on every service, to provide effective feedback; • Site Reliability Engineering is part of the engineering ethos which has been applied to provide consistent patterns and designs to support a highly available and resilient service; • all requirements are defined, tracked and monitored; and • performance testing is a key part of every release cycle.