Originally Posted by
flourbasher
Isoft and the NHS then......
I can't remember the exact year but it was around the mid noughties and the company I was working for at the time got an urgent phone call from NHS Estates asking for urgent managerial assistance to set up a commercial office space in the West Midlands with very tight timescales. Within three weeks was the timescale and the deadline of 9am on a certain Monday morning MUST be met at all costs. We were never told who was moving in beforehand though.
A lot of resource was employed to fit out an office in Solihull working nights and weekends at premium rates. It cost about twice as much as it should have done if we had been given more time to put in data cabling, power, server rooms, wc,s , ********, desks, security etc.
A small team of us were there on the Monday morning to meet the secretive new occupants and to make sure that they have every they needed and working and therefore to confirm we'd met the deadline.
We waited and waited and waited until late morning until we made phone calls to the NHS Estates dept and asked where they were.
We were told that the space was for Isoft who were building the NHS patient database and also funding barnsleys transfers.
But.....Isoft had not recruited any IT programmers yet so it would be months before anyone moved in.
The NHS explained that it was in their contract with Isoft to provide an W Mids base by a certain date and if they didn't they they were liable to pay a penalty to Isoft.
The fact that Isoft hadn't recruited any staff and were seriously behind in timescales for the database didn't seem to have any consequences.
Naturally we were all livid. I blame Barnsley and their fans.
