I wrote some software a couple of years back that is used by a few NHS hospitals and well things seem weird in the world of NHS IT. The software came originally from the idea of a hospitals IT director who really knew his stuff. He asked a known supplier to modify their software and I was brought in to write some middleware to link things together. To cut a long story short everything went to plan and fully working software was produced in less time than expected and under budget. I was pleased because 2 more NHS hospitals bought the software and things were looking good.

Trouble is this success attracted someones attention and before long we had the whoever was the NHS IT consultants at that time bothering us. Soon we were being bombarded with requests for paperwork , minutes of meetings where technical specs were decided (we did all that by email anyway). We were later told this is all standard procedure the consultants use to attract work for their own code monkeys and in this case it worked.

As a result no more hospitals bought the software although the ones who bought it love it and the consultants replacement was never delivered ! 232