The London Ambulance Service: An Analysis Of The London Ambulance Service
The London Ambulance Service (LAS) is one of the biggest services in the world. The LAS covers a geographical area of over 600 square miles which consists of a resident population of 6.8 million people. It carries over 5000 patients every day through the recipient of 2000-2500 calls of which 1300-1600 are emergency calls. [?] In 1990 the service was not up to standards for ambulance response times. Although other parts of the National Health Service (NHS) had undergone improvements, the LAS had not changed much in the past decade. The existing manual dispatch system which relied solely on human activities was responsible for taking emergency calls, deciding which ambulance to send, sending information to ambulances and managing allocation of
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Being a consequent attempt to automate the dispatching system the LAS had allocated £1.5 million for the project, which was roughly 1/5th the cost of the previous attempt. This along with their non-negotiable deadline for the completion of the project, greatly limited the list of potential contractors who would undertake the project. Out of the 17 who submitted proposals, only 5 claimed they could meet this deadline. [?] Negotiation between stakeholders required a better trade off on project management triangle of time, cost and quality. This is something the project team should have considered when awarding the contract.
System Options was a small software company with no experience in developing safety critical software, and this is probably why they were able to bid the lowest for this project. Management of the project was mainly handled by the LAS who selected the PRINCE (Project In Controlled Environment) methodology for the project. Ironically the team had no prior experience in using this methodology or in project management in general. Furthermore managing this project was done on a part-time basis. As the system was delivered in phases, System Options periodically made changes to the system without formal
Being a consequent attempt to automate the dispatching system the LAS had allocated £1.5 million for the project, which was roughly 1/5th the cost of the previous attempt. This along with their non-negotiable deadline for the completion of the project, greatly limited the list of potential contractors who would undertake the project. Out of the 17 who submitted proposals, only 5 claimed they could meet this deadline. [?] Negotiation between stakeholders required a better trade off on project management triangle of time, cost and quality. This is something the project team should have considered when awarding the contract.
System Options was a small software company with no experience in developing safety critical software, and this is probably why they were able to bid the lowest for this project. Management of the project was mainly handled by the LAS who selected the PRINCE (Project In Controlled Environment) methodology for the project. Ironically the team had no prior experience in using this methodology or in project management in general. Furthermore managing this project was done on a part-time basis. As the system was delivered in phases, System Options periodically made changes to the system without formal