Digital Services at the Border (DSAB)

Rating: Compared to financial year 22/23-Q4, the Delivery Confidence Assessment rating at 23/24-Q4 remained at Amber(IPA rating). This is primarily due to the following factors. Delivery Confidence has fluctuated between Amber and Red owing to the need to revise previous assumptions which have led to continued delay to the go-live of Helios 1.0 MVP. Since the programme's last IPA review in November (rated Red), progress against recommendations was sufficient to downgrade this to Amber in March 2024. In the last financial year, DSAB has also secured numerous successes and delivered vital capabilities, with the vast majority of the suite of Border Crossing (BX) Tools now rolled out and operational. The final phase of the Port Office Infrastructure rollout during Q4 succeeded in replacing all historic WI equipment at port PCPs with new, fully functional BX-only equipment. These present major steps forward in terms of the Department's overall aims of digitising the border and lays the groundwork for other important projects and programmes to follow. In the run-up to go-live, DSAB Programme Board now meets fortnightly (previously monthly) in order to monitor progress and hold programme leaders accountable.

Schedule: Compared to financial year 22/23-Q4, the project's end-date at 23/24-Q4 remained schedule to finish on 2023-09-30. This is primarily due to the following factors. Project end date remains baselined as above for 30/09/2023, however current forecast date for this is 30/09/2024 owing to the delays to Helios 1.0 go-live mentioned above; this is currently forecast for July 2024. Additional requirements from the business for contingency and resilience solutions (detailed in section 2) also placed additional pressure on teams and timelines; while some of these are not hard dependencies for go-live, these will be required to follow as soon after go-live as possible. As outlined above, the vast majority of DSAB deliverables have now been delivered, and the PLM arm known as Crossing the Border is increasingly taking on more responsibility and workload to enable DSAB to close.

Cost: Compared to financial year 22/23-Q4, the project's departmental-agree Whole Life Cost at 23/24-Q4 remained at 596m. This is primarily due to the following factors. Budgeted WLC were breached early in 2022/23, due to the programme and the delivery element of its business case expected to close in March '22. Since that time, DSAB has operated 'at risk', utlising a combination of annual funding initially expected to be used on run/tech refresh costs, plus new funding approvals in order to continue delivering the critical milestone of enabling the department to cease reliance on the Warnings Index border IT system.

Source: IPA Annual Report 2023-24 (data)