Chamber and committees

I do not understand why, in table 2 of your written submission to the committee, you have described categories as being “areas of spend”, but that is not what they are. The table is a time profile that is broken down by resource type. In order to get a good handle on any IT project, you need to understand that effort by phase, do you not?

Is that where an agreement might come into play so that, rather than an outcome or area just being assigned to an individual, there would be agreements that explained the contribution to it?

Dr French, could you pick up on that and also say whether there is a sense in which the metrics need to be split apart from the capturing of the outcomes? I accept what Dr Elliott is saying, but I think that, if we just had qualitative outcomes with no measurement, we would have a problem. At the focus group that I attended in Glasgow—there were parallel focus groups in Dundee and Glasgow—there was a view that we are not using data properly and that we have narrow metrics, which is a problem because, in the 21st-century world, people use big data sets and do much richer data analysis.

Do we need to split apart the capturing of the outcomes from the measurement, and do we need to overhaul how we conceive of what the measurement looks like so that we can capture that 21st-century big-data approach?

There are two primary issues. One is transparency about up-front decision making. The second is the amount of information that was provided by the project on an ongoing basis.

Mr Carlaw, neither of us is a website developer, but we are both businesspeople. In business, if you have undertakings with multiyear obligations it is a good idea—indeed, if you are a large business, it is a requirement—to specify those adequately on your profit and loss account. In the 2017-18 budget submission from the SPCB, the only indication that the Parliament was undertaking a £3 million website contract is a little line in schedule 3, which is the description against IT digital services projects. It reads as follows:

“Information Technology/Digital Change projects include rolling out the MSP case management system to more MSPs and their staff; delivering a new Parliament website and intranet”—

that is fair enough—

“software (Windows 10 and Office 365) and hardware upgrades for SPS staff; replacing the Parliament telephone system”.

What in those lines would have alerted our predecessor committee to the fact that the Parliament was undertaking a significant website contract? That fact is pretty hidden, is it not?

Ms Wallace, I was struck by your written submission, in which you said that the processes for implementing the national outcomes are “weak”. Ultimately, are we dancing around the issue? It is good to talk about processes and about agencies, but does it not come down to individuals? Do we need to put people on the spot and make them accountable for delivering things? In our conversations, there is a sense that how individuals and agencies elect to play their part in the national framework is almost voluntary. Do we need cabinet secretaries, ministers, directorates and agencies to report against the framework? Should we make that much more explicit?

However, there was no real indication in the lines in schedule 3 that there was a three-year, £3 million undertaking, was there? Do you think that that was sufficiently transparent in terms of the level of detail that was provided, given the significance and scale of the website project?

I appreciate that acknowledgement. I suggest that £3 million as a percentage of a £100 million budget would warrant further—

Can you clarify something for me? On the basis of that answer, I am still not clear about why you took the decision to deliver the project using third-party contractors rather than a single contract. Surely, that is inherently more complicated to manage. You acknowledged that there was not the expertise in-house to build the website. Was there expertise in-house to manage the variety and number of contractors that you have clearly been employing?

Thank you very much. My understanding of the matter is considerably decluttered from when we started.

From looking at the detail that has been presented and from hearing some of the answers today, one of my key concerns is the level of granularity at which the project has been monitored and managed. Mr Carlaw said that it is not possible to specify which bit of spend would have occurred in which year, but I suggest that that is precisely what you should be able to do in a well-run IT project. In a well-run IT project, as I said before, you should understand what levels of effort were required at each phase, and have a project management office that tracks those things, using things such as Gantt charts and projected spend. That seems not to be what we see. I would be grateful if that detail could be provided.

In particular, I am very concerned by the category “non-technical Contractors”, which accounts for almost a third of the total costs. That is a very non-specific category of work. Can you explain why you were using third-party contractors to deliver the project? Managing individual contractors on an individual basis seems to be a very complicated way of managing a project like this, but it seems to be what happened.