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Spreadsheet Blamed For UK Rail Bid Fiasco

Posted by timothy on from the spreadsheet-fiasco-is-redundant dept.

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.'"

16 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. WTF by ohnocitizen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:WTF by cloudmaster · · Score: 5, Funny

      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. ;)

    2. Re:WTF by dna_(c)(tm)(r) · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:WTF by Herr+Brush · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. English as a first language by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:English as a first language by didroe84 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:English as a first language by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  3. So what? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  4. MS added a special feature to Excel - UK edition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Create Huge Row"

  5. ubiquitous by cratermoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:ubiquitous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  6. Further Background for non-UKians by itsdapead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
  7. Re:Ban power users! by KingTank · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:MS added a special feature to Excel - UK editio by dna_(c)(tm)(r) · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Create Huge Row"

    And the Daily Mail dedicated several Columns to it.

  9. Re:Ban power users! by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:Why should the government asses the bid? by bpkiwi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.