Spreadsheet error delays opening of £150m children’s hospital
A spreadsheet error led Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman to overrule NHS Lothian plans to open Edinburgh’s new £150m children’s hospital. £16m remedial work and public inquiry are underway.
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Staggering incompetance!
I hope the contractor that identified, and corrected the error, but lost the contract is compensated!
Agreed - Poor controls from start to finish.
Note the contractor that identified the error and corrected it were only bidding on the work. The contractor that won the work didn't notice the error.
A tale of the modern world. Lack of care causes massive dumb error.Competent staff in one company spot mistake and are ignored when they try to point it out and of course their bid fails possibly because of this.
The less competent win the work, do what they've got a contract for and then get paid again for remedial work.
What a shambles.
Hands up if you think someone will lose their job over this
"In addition to the £14m monthly maintenance and facility payments for, the private children’s hospital will cost the Scottish government £432 over the next 25 years."
£432 over 25 years sounds like a bargain!
£432 now corrected but is the £14 million not supposed to be the £1.4 million mentioned earlier in the article? The decimal point might be relevant.
Other articles on the subject claim that the £432 million includes the £1.4 million monthly payment...
From reading the report I doubt the air change matrix will get much time in the forthcoming inquiry. If LHB and Project Co couldn't get the basics on air change right for the building at the start, couple that with the confusion around what rooms had what purpose and whether they should have ensuites, the poor soul trying to produce the matrix didn't stand much chance anyway...rubbish in.
So, my very reasonable comment regarding your lazy anti spreadsheet headline for this article, gets thanked twice and deleted by you. Perhaps you should try having the grace to apologise for your silly editorial line and change the title.
I dare not criticise the scots, what with their anti-free speech laws in the pipeline.
Just to point out it's not the contractor's responsibility to pick up these errors since if they badly under quoted for another part of the job the client would expect them to honour the erroneous quote or withdraw their tender.
This is purely the client's responsibility and whether they choose to go after their representatives they employed who made the error is their choice.
The use of spreadsheets for project management/specification is clearly the wrong tool for the job.
How big concerns can hold their heads up in public with such basic incompetence is beyond me.
The employees using spreadsheets for the wrong purpose are like the plumbers who put screws in with their hammer!
Sorry but I am going to disagree. Project managers have been using spreadsheets effectively and successfully, long before anything more recent. It is the skill level and experience of the user and how controls are applied that are at issue here.
Awebs editorial line of bashing spreadsheet’s at every opportunity is misplaced to say the least. Automation, cloud, or big data does not replace professional skill or the fundamentals of making sure you understand what you are looking at, irrespective of the tool being used, hammer or not. You only need to ask the Government Minster for Education, who has clearly had the most recent lesson in over reliance on those with algorithms and no common sense
Reading the report, it does seem that the spreadsheet was very poorly designed. And the irony is that the correct specification was on the first worksheet.
GT keep referring to copying although I do sometimes wonder if they mean referencing - difficult to be sure without seeing the file itself. If it was actual copying, it is like using a spreadsheet to type in a column of numbers and then adding them up on a calculator and typing in the total.
If only they had read the ICAEW "Twenty Principles for good spreadsheet practice"......