Nine DHCW programmes compete for shared delivery capacity that cannot satisfy all of them. No programme gets enough resource to succeed; every programme produces some output; none reach the threshold of working software. The commons — engineering capacity, integration time, clinical-engagement bandwidth — is depleted faster than it regenerates. The 0/9 on-time programmes figure is not an anomaly — it is the predictable consequence of treating shared capacity as inexhaustible.
What is the tragedy-of-the-commons trap at DHCW?
The Tragedy of the Commons occurs when multiple users draw from a shared resource, each acting rationally in their own interest, but collectively depleting the resource until it fails everyone. No individual user has an incentive to restrain their consumption.
How It Manifests at DHCW
Nine major programmes draw on one pool of delivery capacity — the same engineers, architecture teams, integration specialists, testing environments — and each programme director fights for a share. The current set runs to at least CANISC, LIMS, RISP, WICIS, EPMA, the NHS Wales App, GP system migration, cloud transition, eye care and digital maternity. When Welsh Government escalated DHCW to Level 3 it named all nine; none was delivering to time. That is not nine separate failures. It is one shared resource consumed faster than it regenerates.
The clearest case is diagnostics, where two national programmes were forced through the same teams at once. The diagnostics programme director told the board exactly what that cost: “we’ve had to condense four years of activity into two years… both LIMS2 and the radiology program are now running concurrently, and that has put significant pressure on resources across NHS Wales.” Another programme director put the compression in one line — “we compressed what would have been a four-year program into two years, and I think we’re seeing some of the consequences of that now.” The depletion was concrete and local: single health boards found themselves inside three national programmes at once, “a lot of change activity” landing on the same overstretched staff.
And the over-stocking was structural, named at the start and never corrected. Seven months in, the chief operating officer told the board the obvious: “the expectation will always be wider than our capacity to deliver… because there are so many opportunities in this field.” The prescription — choose, and stop the rest — was offered repeatedly and refused each time. On the founding board an independent member asked the executive to identify “what we might want to stop doing in order for us to focus on the key priorities.” No stop list ever followed. The architecture team’s early plea for the board to champion and protect its work met the same fate: noted, not acted on. Even internal audit eventually asked the question leadership would not — whether national programmes “being led by an individual health board” had “the capacity to roll out at a national level.” The answer was no, and the portfolio kept growing.
So the commons is drawn down to nothing. By the escalation board, programmes were running on fumes — “for both iCare and connecting care we didn’t actually receive any money,” the operations director told the board, “a huge ask to do what we had to do over the last year without any funding.” Every new programme makes it worse, because the hiring reflex pulls the few experienced staff off delivery to onboard the many new ones, and leaders without delivery experience cannot triage what to protect. The resource is not merely depleted. It is depleted and mismanaged at once.
Produced By
L1: The Hiring Trap — each programme demands more people, but adding people to the shared pool makes it less productive, not more.
How is the tragedy-of-the-commons trap broken?
Ruthless portfolio focus. Pause six programmes. Deliver three. The three must be selected by an independent panel including health board clinicians — not by DHCW leadership, who will prioritise programmes that justify their empire over programmes that deliver clinical value. One-page delivery contracts: scope, deadline, target, consequences.
The blueprint’s Intervention 3: Portfolio Ruthlessness targets this trap directly – cutting nine competing programmes to three gives each survivor enough of the shared resource to actually deliver.