Here’s our latest leaked email, this time from a senior executive of a large UK legal IT software company, to one of the support managers at Polaris, who are running the new RTA A2A Personal Injury Portal for the MoJ. We continue to hear reports that development deadlines were seemingly driven by politicians in the old Labour government looking for PR opportunities…
(sent 11th May)… I thought that the next window for change was June, yet here are more unannounced changes to the test AND live system together – with NO advance notice. It’s completely unacceptable that this situation is continuing – there is no opportunity for anyone to plan for these changes, develop the appropriate code, test the changes and then distribute the revised software to our clients.
It would be sensible if someone would establish a proper change control procedure and communicate such a plan to all involved parties. Yet again we will have to implement emergency revision to our coding, without any opportunity to test – I sincerely hope that these amendments don’t cause any further problems. I would recommend that changes between the test and live systems are notified well in advance, and that there is adequate time given to the user community for developing and testing any necessary code changes before the upgrade goes live.
I’m sure that the majority of the recipients of this email are thoroughly fed up with the difficulties of this project, and this ongoing lack of communication and planning only increases the lack of faith in the system.
I’m sorry to sound so negative, but am despondent at the apparent lack of partnership between CRIF/IDSL and the user community.
