Spreadsheet Blamed For UK Rail Bid Fiasco

First time accepted submitter Bruce66423 writes "As a sometime computer programmer who was always very sniffy about the quality of the stuff being knocked up by amateurs aka power users, the current claim that it was a messed up spreadsheet that caused a multi-million pound fiasco is very satisfying. 'The key mechanism... mixed up real and inflated financial figures and contained elements of double counting.'"

Comments

WTF

[ohnocitizen]

So a sometime programmer likes to think he is better than people who don't know how to program at all? As a fulltime programmer (which apparently puts me higher in the hierarchy) I think that is just a bit silly.

Re:WTF

[cloudmaster]

As a Unix sysadmin, I know that all developers - full time or not - are way too full of their perceived abilities to do things correctly. ;)

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny though, the stuff that programmers want to write custom code to accomplish, when a general-purpose program exists that can solve the same problem.

Re:WTF

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So a sometime programmer likes to think he is better than people who don't know how to program at all?

I guess that in a similar way, people who can read and write consider themselves better than those who are illiterate. Why is that silly? A significant number of people seems to think that teaching problem solving using automated data processing tools (sometimes manifested as programming) should have almost the same priority in schools as reading and writing.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny though how the IT department always has to take over and maintain the garbage spreadsheets and databases put together by the "power user" in various organizations when that person leaves or is transferred. We inherit this utter crap and then are expected to maintain things that never should have been built in an end user computing platform like Excel or the like.

Re:WTF

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

As a Unix sysadmin, I know that all developers - full time or not - are way too full of their perceived abilities to do things correctly. ;)

The Excel manager (or the closely related Powerpoint manager) has something in common with the Only-Development Matters developer, the Without-Sysadmin-The-Universe-Would-Shutdown-Now systems guy and the Nothing-Happens-When-I-Dont Sell people. Silo silliness.

Re:WTF

[girlintraining]

The Excel manager (or the closely related Powerpoint manager) has something in common with the Only-Development Matters developer, the Without-Sysadmin-The-Universe-Would-Shutdown-Now systems guy and the Nothing-Happens-When-I-Dont Sell people. Silo silliness.

You forgot to mention they all live in the I'm-A-Unique-and-Beautiful-Snowflake land, not We're-All-In-This-Together-ville. I know, the second one is a lot smaller -- it's just a town on the outskirts of the much larger land, but... I think these things matter. :D

Re:WTF

[Herr Brush]

Its funny how the IT department doesn't want to build the apps in the first place which means end users have to do the work themselves.

Re:WTF

[rbmyers]

Let all of us who are old enough raise a glass to toast the days when people who wrote programs, who rarely referred to themselves as programmers, understood full well that they didn't know what they were doing and were going to make mistakes.

Re:WTF

[maxwell demon]

It's funny how the IT department thinks it knows better about what people need for their work than the people actually doing that work.

English as a first language

[Okian Warrior]

For those of us who speak English as a first language, here's a translation:

"A messed-up spreadsheet caused a multi-million-pound fiasco."

I think it refers to government financing for some sort of rail transport project in England, but I'm not as sure about that part.

Re:English as a first language

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll try and lay it out in brief:

In the 90's the public Inter city rail system was privitised.

Since then, companies bid for contracts to provide services (13 years in length iirc)

One of the main francises was recently up for renewal (the main route from London to Scotland)

The current holders lost out to a new comer and challange the bid in the courts as being to good to be true.

They lost the trial and the contract was awarded.

It has since transpired (thanks to documents examined in court or documents given a second examination because of the trial, I'm unsure which) that the way the bid was assessed was incorrect.

This was due to a new system being put in place and used for the very first time.

The Minister in charge of this was removed from their Job about 3 weeks before any of this came to light.

This is the first source I've seen providing any actual excuse for what's happened other than "Unexceptable errors".

Re:English as a first language

[didroe84]

The way our railways were privitised (which has been a total disaster btw), is that the government leases out monopolies on routes to companies for 10-15 years. This is about one of the routes coming up for renewal and the contract being taken away from the current operator (Virgin). After the announcement of the winner, Virgin said the other company had made an unrealistic bid and wouldn't be able to operate the route at the quoted rate. Now it turns out the government department overseeing the bidding process has messed up the calculations when assessing the feasibility of the bid.

Re:English as a first language

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's try and fix that for you:

In the 90s the UK rail system was privatised, with various franchises set up to run passenger services on different routes.

The length of the franchises has varied over the years. The government wanted to let longer (~15 years) franchises to try and persuade the franchisees to invest in the routes they serve (short franchises meant they wouldn't be running the show long enough to see a return on their investment).

Five years ago another franchise (the East Coast route from London to Scotland) was let to the National Express group. Two years in they found that they'd bid too high for the franchise and couldn't afford the payments they'd promised the government (or at least weren't making any money). So they walked away and left the government with the keys.

The government had come up with a new method of evaluating franchises to try and avoid this in the future. This was used for the franchise in question (West Coast route from London to Scotland, Manchester, Birmingham). The incumbent, Virgin, put in a bid, as well as three others. One of the others (First) was announced as the winner, but Virgin kicked up a fuss saying that First's bid was too risky: First's bid offered more money to the government late in the franchise, and little in the first years. Virgin's was more evenly spread.

Virgin called for a judicial review of the franchising procedure, as they were entitled to do. The government insisted that the process was followed correctly and said First would take over in December. They started gathering evidence to present their case.

This week they found that they had made major mistakes and would have the book thrown at them if they went in front of a judge. So they called the whole process off and will refund all bidders the money they spent on their bids. (40 million pounds or so.)

Apart from the obvious political fallout there's the issue of who's going to run the railway when Virgin's current franchise period ends. It was extended once for the Olympics, and European competition law might say that it can't be extended again. The government may have to operate it directly instead. But they're already running the East Coast route. And there are four or five smaller franchises that were due to be let over the next two years. The franchise letting process is going to have to be ripped out and put back together again. The process of letting all those franchises will have to be put on hold. Will the government have to take those over in the short term as well? Can they find enough railway managers to do that?

In short, it is a ghastly mess.

So what?

[betterunixthanunix]

Spreadsheets are popular for the following reasons:

1. They are programs that are not based on assigning values to variables
2. Users get a visual representation of where values are being assigned and how values are related to each other
3. The syntax of expressions is familiar, and there is little syntax that users need to learn beyond that

I suspect there are better ways to get all of the above, but that is irrelevant. Does the submitter think that people who use other programming languages do not make such catastrophic mistakes? I think history says otherwise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501

Bugs can be costly, regardless of whether those bugs are in spreadsheets or Ada programs.

MS added a special feature to Excel - UK edition

[Anonymous Coward]

"Create Huge Row"

Background for non-UKians

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

A "rail franchise" in the UK is a Government-granted monopoly to run services over a particular rail route for a set period of time. The monopoly is awarded to the Train Operating Company ( TOC ) that basically bids the highest fee.

Rolling stock is provided by the Government, too, in conjunction with the TOC.

Notionally it is possible for Open Access Operators to also operate services over parts of the same route, but this flies in the face of the cushy relationship between Government and TOCs and so generally isn't granted.

This is the state of rail "privatisation" in the UK today.

ubiquitous

[cratermoon]

Spreadsheets -- well, Excel really -- are inescapable in business.

I know personally of complex multimillion dollar deals in the oil and gas business involving buying and selling entire refineries and gas pipelines where the numbers were all worked out on a spreadsheet.

The insurance industry lives on the spreadsheets put together by the actuaries.

The only consistent reason I've seen for Excel users will give up their rows and columns and have bespoke software created is when the dataset gets cumbersomely large. A secondary reason is when the kinds of calculations needed can't be cobbled together with Excel's function and macro tools. Even then, it's not unheard of for users to demand summary/aggregate reports and analytics that they then copy the numbers from into their spreadsheet to do their scenarios.

Just keep in mind the next time you hear about big money moving around in some deal -- somewhere someone probably had a pivot table for that.

Re:ubiquitous

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an actuary and at my company, the programmers are pushing to replace Excel based tools with tools based on in house software. It's a disaster since the programmers have no grasp of what Excel does right. Before, users could trace calculations back to their source, and if something wasn't done properly it could be overridden, but now we get an HTML file showing the calculation with the "formula" in the margin. I put formula in quotes because we don't actually see the code the program executes, we just see what the programmer wrote describing the expression hat was evaluated.

The programmers have been claiming that they can get it so it just works and then our complaints should be moot, but so far they've never gotten close.

On top of that, by leaving Excel you lose things like robust cut and paste and undo history for user inputs. Plus the user interface makes it easy to overwrite your saved results with a scratch calclation.

Re:ubiquitous

[ax_42]

Actuarial science is a specialised field, requiring a lot of understanding of the underlying calculations so that they can be properly implemented. The work that actuaries do also requires a lot of flexibility around changing the underlying model (e.g. to implement a new feature). Excel offers this quite well as a platform, and there are various suites of software commercially available which also meet those needs, tailored to actuarial work (and more importantly, workflow). Getting proper development processes in place (documentation, testing, specs) can be a challenge, but trying to solve the problem by writing your own system is knuckleheaded in the extreme. You will end up reimplementing Excel, badly.

For the record, I am or have been a developer, an actuary, a PM in charge of building an actuarial system, and a manager charged with making the best possible solutions available for our actuaries to work effectively (Excel + MoSes is what works for us, YMMV of course).

get over yourself

[phantomfive]

"As a sometime computer programmer who was always very sniffy about the quality of the stuff being knocked up by amateurs aka power users,

Get over yourself. 'Real' programmers make mistakes too, sometimes mistakes that kill people.

The problem seems to be an accounting/design problem, mixing different kinds of data, not a problem of programmer skill. Since I don't understand accounting, I will not claim that I wouldn't make the same mistake, and I've been a professional programmer for years.

Further Background for non-UKians

[itsdapead]

This is the state of rail "privatisation" in the UK today.

Just to expand on that, "Privatisation" is a UK concept that seeks to combine the efficiency and value for money of government with the social responsibility and long-term vision of big business.

It's what you get if you spend so much time flip-flopping between socialist and capitalist governments that even the parties forget which is which.

Re:Ban power users!

[KingTank]

Get all those stupid computers off people's desks! Things were much better when you had to go to a programmer in order to get software to do anything!

And (not incidentally) it would eliiminate all the productivity that's lost to Slashdot!

Your sarcasm is unwarranted. This is a nice story for us programmers because it's just the kind of anecdote that makes businesses seriously consider hiring more professional programmers. Nobody is suggesting you need custom software for everything.

Re:MS added a special feature to Excel - UK editio

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

"Create Huge Row"

And the Daily Mail dedicated several Columns to it.

Re:What to trust

[houghi]

I have had a situation where the outcome was absolutely not what I expected. I would have needed about 25% more FTE then what I would expect with my experience.

I checked and rechecked again and still came up with the same information.

Instead of getting the extra 25% people in, I decided to do all the calculations on paper AND give it to two other people to go over it to find out where I went wrong.

Eventually I got the correct number that was close to what I expected it to be and we also found the error I initially made. There is one thing that no tool has: experience.
If you blindly follow your tool, you are a tool. You are one of the people who drives into the river because your GPS tells you to go left.

Its all about the process dummy.

[A Pressbutton]

The calculation could have been done on paper / blood on a wall / notches on a stick
and
carried out by throwing dice / abacus / mental arithmetic
by
morons / normal people / genii
If the process was not validated and the results were not checked, why is anyone surprised when it is wrong?
Some areas can be defined as right or wrong by people with good minds and strong opinions - games
Tax and Financial software not so.
At some point in the process $product needs to be validated using $external_process by $people_who_should_know
I am betting this did not happen.

Re:Ban power users!

[fm6]

The submitter is suggesting — no, make that "claiming" — that spreadseets are dangerous because they allow "non-professionals" to program. Now, spreadsheets are the original "killer app" for PCs. Huge numbers of CP/M-based systems were sold just to run VisiCalc, and this probably had a lot to do with IBM biting the bullet and getting into the desktop computer business, with results that reverberate to this very day and the forseeable future. Alan Kay, one of the inventors of OOP and GUI, cites spreadsheets as a tool that turn ordinary users into programmers. Attack spreadsheets, and you attack the entire idea of user-centric programming. The submitter's attitude is reminiscint of the pre-Woz era, when you had to negotiate with your programming staff to do even the simplest computing and programmers were known as "High Priests of a Low Cult". There's a lot of room for sarcasm here.

More than I thought to use. I also could have been sarcastic about the assumption that "hire a pro" is a magic bullet for avoiding fuckups. Really? "Professionals" never make stupid, multimillion-dollar mistakes? Get real.

"Have somebody check your work" is the applicable lesson here. "Hire a pro and you're safe." is just bullshit.

Re:Ban power users!

[ray-auch]

Get all those stupid computers off people's desks! Things were much better when you had to go to a programmer in order to get software to do anything!

And (not incidentally) it would eliiminate all the productivity that's lost to Slashdot!

Your sarcasm is unwarranted. This is a nice story for us programmers because it's just the kind of anecdote that makes businesses seriously consider hiring more professional programmers. Nobody is suggesting you need custom software for everything.

And you've missed the point.

It is just as likely that the accounting model was incorrect rather than the implementation. If the spec is wrong (or unclear or incomplete) then you will get garbage out whatever tools you use - excel, c, c++, c#, haskell or real programming in Fortran (assembler if you must). If you don't test and cross check your outputs then you risk not spotting implementation mistakes - whatever tools you use.

Essentially, someone's built a wooden shed the wrong size and in the wrong place vs. the plan - and now they're in trouble for it. The submitter is saying "that's what happens when amateurs use wood and nails to make buildings, if they'd just hired us steelworkers to do the job properly using steel, it wouldn't have happened".

Re:Why should the government asses the bid?

[bpkiwi]

Because without some sort of proof of a sound business model, a company can underbid/overbid (underbid on cost, overbid on the fees they will pay the government) just to get into the market. Then they can run the service into the ground, suck any money they can out into 'consulting fees' and other such expenses that end up in the investor's pockets, and then just go bankrupt. The government gets left holding the run down remains, and suddenly all the trains stop.

Re:Spreadsheets are defective tools

[Hognoxious]

Imagine you having 15 values to add. Now you want to change that program to add up 20 values. In normal programming languages that is just changing one value. On a spreadsheet you now need to change all instances where that array is mentioned. You have no chance of using a constant or searching for "15". It is very likely you miss one thing you should have changed.

Excel and OOCalc both allow you to name cells or ranges. And formulae, at least for me, automatically adjust if I insert more rows. Then again, I don't go "A1+A2 ... +A15" because I've heard of colon notation. You'd have the same problem with a programmer who didn't know how to use arrays.

And there's another problem which isn't relevant here, but you should consider none the less when thinking about spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets lock their data in complex formats.

I haven't met one that couldn't export CSV, tab delimited etc etc.