But the reality is...

But the reality is... these systems are NOT that complicated and a team of no more than 10-15 people could plan, design and implement the system in at most two years.

The swathe of problems are underpinned by various "interested" parties, for example the telecoms supplier (BT), supplying a different project manager for every meeting (ensuring the waste of 99% of every meeting as the project needs to be explained time and time again), EDS having more project "managers" than staff who actually do anything even partly useful and the customer (DWP) in this case, trying to do everything by committee and producing a specification that's so vague and so contradictory in many places and enormously over-detailed in others that it's a wonder it's even possible to read it.

And yes, these are the jokes that want to spend more billions on a waste of time, will never do what it says on the tin, ID card scheme.