Combination punching

Thanks to Computer Weekly for keeping us across news from the protagonists' dressing rooms ahead of the Inter BBC Digital Media Welterweight bout at the Public Accounts Committee this afternoon.

Sacked CTO John Linwood, in the blue corner, has responded to the BBC's response to his response. Here he offers two specific examples of "the business" aka BBC Vision changing its requirements big-time as his team were trying to deliver solutions.

Linwood claimed that users wanted a function to produce a "rough cut" of video output, which was subsequently developed, only to be told that those users now wanted to use an off-the-shelf product from Adobe instead. Once the IT team had integrated that Adobe product into the DMI software, users then said they wanted to use a different Adobe product altogether, said Linwood. 

In another example, he quoted changes to requirements for search functionality, at each stage requiring "significant and challenging" extra work, according to Linwood. "These changes caused delays in delivery which were appropriately reported at every stage," he said. 

He concluded: "I thought that the BBC’s decision to abandon the entire project and write‐off the full value of the project and the technology we had delivered was beyond belief and unjustified.”