TSB programme pulled apart in report on IT meltdown
Summary
The disaster has cost the bank hundreds of millions of pounds in compensating customers, additional resources for advisory services from companies such as IBM and Deloitte, fraud and forgone income. Problems identified during the investigation included the decision to perform a “big bang” migration without fully understanding the risks, a lack of assessing the capabilities of Sabis, and the fact that there were no expert external advisers for the project as a whole. Although there were a number of test events which identified some potential problems, these represented too small a part of the overall platform, said the report, adding: “The live proving was not carried out at a sufficient scale to allow TSB to identify the problems that would arise when Proteo4UK was taken live to the entire TSB customer base.” Neither was there a sufficient assessment of whether Sabis was capable of delivering Proteo4UK, said the report, and there was a lack of independent expert advice on the project as a whole. IBM said in its report: “We have not seen evidence of the application of a rigorous set of go-live criteria to prove production readiness.” The tech supplier compared the project to a similar one it had worked on in the past, describing the rigour it would expect in such a project: “In a similar situation when IBM partnered with a financial organisation to migrate to a new core banking platform, multiple trial migrations were conducted, rolled back and then remediated prior to launch. The production launch was done over a longer period, initially open to programme members only, then staff, then targeted customer groups, before full launch to new customers and subsequent migration.” After the publication of the Slaugher and May report, Richard Meddings, chairman of the TSB board, apologised for the disaster and said: “When we commissioned Slaughter and May to carry out this review, we specifically asked for a fully independent and thorough inquiry.