Abstract
This report reviews the various causes of the failure of the London Ambulance
Service software project. Reasons for failure have been attributed to the hardware issues,
Software issues, technological difficulties, design methodology issues, operation and maintenance of the system issues. These issues caused by the poor team construction, unrealistic scheduling, unclear objects, lack of quality assurance, lack of communication, poor project management, lack of risk management etc.
Introduction
The London ambulance service was the largest ambulance service in the world. This service provided service to 500 patient a day, handled 2500 calls a day and 2700 full-time staff employed in the organization. In 1980’s London Ambulance service …show more content…
The LAS system was lightly loaded at start-up on 1992 and it was adopted several issues arose from its first use. For examples ambulance locations were incorrect, ambulance response time become unacceptable, response to emergency calls was several hours, slow response times for certain screen-based activities and system could not cope with the load placed on it by normal use. The system didn’t function well when given incomplete data and there was a memory leak in a portion of the code. The failure of the system was caused by combination of …show more content…
The cost estimation is important factor in the success of a project. The first step was to select a supplier for the project. The project was put out to tender by LAS staff who had no experience with information technology. They chose the cheapest bid cost of f £937,463 form tender who had never managed a large project. The contract did not specify who would act as project manager.
System Specifications and Design issues as LAS management failed to follow the project management methodologies like PRINCE. Some of the design decisions such as allocators could only get info on ambulances by reserving an ambulance, control room layout made it hard for operators to communicate and system could not handle operators overriding computer decisions made it harder to recover from errors. And also they used false assumptions such as perfect accuracy of total hardware, perfect location/status information and perfect quality of
This report reviews the various causes of the failure of the London Ambulance
Service software project. Reasons for failure have been attributed to the hardware issues,
Software issues, technological difficulties, design methodology issues, operation and maintenance of the system issues. These issues caused by the poor team construction, unrealistic scheduling, unclear objects, lack of quality assurance, lack of communication, poor project management, lack of risk management etc.
Introduction
The London ambulance service was the largest ambulance service in the world. This service provided service to 500 patient a day, handled 2500 calls a day and 2700 full-time staff employed in the organization. In 1980’s London Ambulance service …show more content…
The LAS system was lightly loaded at start-up on 1992 and it was adopted several issues arose from its first use. For examples ambulance locations were incorrect, ambulance response time become unacceptable, response to emergency calls was several hours, slow response times for certain screen-based activities and system could not cope with the load placed on it by normal use. The system didn’t function well when given incomplete data and there was a memory leak in a portion of the code. The failure of the system was caused by combination of …show more content…
The cost estimation is important factor in the success of a project. The first step was to select a supplier for the project. The project was put out to tender by LAS staff who had no experience with information technology. They chose the cheapest bid cost of f £937,463 form tender who had never managed a large project. The contract did not specify who would act as project manager.
System Specifications and Design issues as LAS management failed to follow the project management methodologies like PRINCE. Some of the design decisions such as allocators could only get info on ambulances by reserving an ambulance, control room layout made it hard for operators to communicate and system could not handle operators overriding computer decisions made it harder to recover from errors. And also they used false assumptions such as perfect accuracy of total hardware, perfect location/status information and perfect quality of