Services Australia hits Java, Angular dev pool shortage

A limited pool of Java and Angular developers led to the long-running health delivery modernisation program at Services Australia drifting “outside of tolerances”, but the situation had been rectified, officials said yesterday.

The program's status attracted media and political attention earlier this month, following a point-in-time assessment of its progress, but project and IT leaders told senate estimates yesterday that it is on track and delivering.

Deputy CEO and general manager of health programs Kirsty Faichney said the health modernisation had been running “almost six years”, in 18-month or two-year “waves”.

She disputed characterisations of the program being in trouble, saying that any issues seen in the current “wave” of works were “because of the tight labour market”.

“It was hard to get some of our technical resources on as quickly as we would like, and so if there is a slow ramp-up in a program with the resourcing level that you need, that drives, underspend which tends to click our tolerances into underspend,” she said.

“We have now - thank you to my technical colleagues - absolutely ramped up [to] a significant number of resources. They will help recover the time and as a result of the high level of resources, that will of course eat into the budget which means it’ll drop back out of being an underspend and go back within the tolerance.”

Chief information and digital officer Charles McHardie said that Java and Angular developers and testers were hard to come by in large numbers.

“If you look at the areas where we are most under pressure, it is in the Java developer space, the Angular developer space, and some of the testing resources that sit around that,” he said.

McHardie also said that Services Australia had to balance a large number of concurrent projects that may have similar resource needs, but tighter delivery timeframes.

“If you look at the competing priorities that we have in that space, we’re not only developing large programs of work like we’re talking about here with health delivery modernisation, but we also generally run between 120 and 130 smaller projects each year which are focused on legislative change. 

“So for us, particularly in the health and aged care space where we have a lot of work underway at the moment, we’re always balancing the priorities between legislative go-live dates, of which there are many in the health and aged care space which we just can’t miss, and then also all of these large programs of work which are generally multi-year programs of work, and health delivery modernisation is a good example of that. 

“This wave of the program is a two-year program of work, so we’ve got to balance priorities between a two-year program of work and some legislative go-live dates which sometimes need delivery within months.”

McHardie defended the overall progress of the health delivery modernisation, given its beginnings six years ago.

“This is a program we’re extremely proud of technically,” he said.

“If we look back six years ago in the Medicare space, we had a platform that was very much end-of-life, had a lot of stability and security issues. 

“Over the last five years in particular, we’ve stabilised the platform and we’re at a point now where we’re making a lot of those changes … which are both provider- and customer-facing, which is a great place to be because six years ago we were very worried about making any changes to the Medicare system because of the stability issues we had with the platform.

“That’s a good place to be.”

Health delivery transformation general manager Brendan Moon said the program had delivered a number of improvements in the past year alone.

These included digitising applications for a Medicare entitlement statement, which had been used by 132,000 people since June last year; the ability to claim for continence aids payments online; and a new capability that allows permanent residents - or those that have applied - to enrol in Medicare online.

“That went live late year,” Moon said.

“Since December of last year, we’ve seen 9259 people apply to enrol for Medicare online.”

Moon said that work on the third phase of the modernisation is continuing.

“We have a range of things scheduled to be delivered throughout the rest of this financial year and now through the end of the calendar year,” he said.

“They include enhancements to our digital Medicare enrolment service that we implemented in December to see many more people being able to apply for Medicare online, including Australian and New Zealand residents, people under reciprocal healthcare agreements, and Ministerial orders, and also enhancements to the staff interface.

“We also have a range of improvements to our digital provider experience, including many more healthcare professionals being able to apply for their initial provider number online.”