Software Project Failure Case Study

This is the written report for the Assignment 01 of CSC2407 - Introduction to Software Engineering. The report consists of responses to the 3 questions given in assignment instructions, which are as follows;
Q1: Study and comment on a software project failure, found on the internet. Explain the project and its circumstances, reasoning the facts which caused it to fail.
Q2: Explain the Waterfall method used in software development, elaborating its phases, advantages, disadvantages and addressing the given project scenario (explained below).
Q3: Explain the Agile methodology used in software development, elaborating its phases, advantages, disadvantages, and the benefits of pair programming.
Q4: Prepare the project schedule for the given task.
Q1: Software Project Failure Case Study
The case study selected is related to the healthcare domain. The project in question was conducted by the UK National Program for IT, for the National Health Service of England. The objective of this program was to provide a nation-wide in sequence infrastructure for the healthcare institutes of UK, while improving the patient care quality (Johnson, 2014). Since this was a large project, several companies were selected to develop different infrastructure of the system.
BT for developing the NHS Care Record Service system and setting up NHS National Network (N3), using VPN infrastructure
Atos Origin to develop a 'Choose & Book' system, which allows patients to choose a hospital, date and time for making an appointment with the doctor.
SCC for desktop & infrastructure management services
Soft’s Lorenzo System for integrated patient management and clinical record management.
In order to avoid monopolies of a single IT supplier, the program decides to establish local service providers for five clusters within UK: London, Southern, East & East Midlands, North East, and North West & West
Given the nature of the project in question - which is large, complex and critical in terms of both cost and function, more consideration should have been given for project planning. Although NHS has made a decision to sector out the project to reduce complexities and risks, it seems the coordination between the sectors was not sufficient enough. It is also evident that the project management was not capable to address the internal disputes between and within the LSPs, which also resulted in the expected results not being delivered.
Given the scale and nature of the project, the requirements are in nature quite complex as the health care requirements of different regions would be different. Furthermore, the internal processes of different healthcare providers also would be different. These should have been clearly identified in the requirement phase and should have come to a decision as to whether the system is going to cater to all different processes or whether they are going to be standardized in a national level. It appears that this was not addressed properly, which resulted in changes being requested at the very later