Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 19
19
There has been some improvement in the risk ratings applied to the programme.
Conclusion
There has been some improvement in the risk ratings applied to the programme. The most recent IPA review rated it as amber, having previously been amber-red following the reset. This was in response to improved governance and leadership in line with recommendations from the IPA and from an internal Department review.37 Despite these modest improvements the programme still rated its own scope risk as red as recently as August 2020 after one aspect of programme delivery slipped on its timeline, although it has since returned to amber.38 Coordination with related projects
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.