It is not all doom and gloom. As an integrated services provider, Dunstan Thomas has had privileged access to the Money and Pensions Services' dashboard team and we have found that they have many talented and genuinely helpful people on the programme.
Dashboards will eventually emerge from this elongated pupal stage as an even more beautiful butterfly than we had hoped.
In re-setting the dates, the minister must accept that some questions will only be answerable in live running. The volumes of dashboard enquiries is one of those unknowns, and we will only hit peak volumes some time after launch when a popular TV programme encourages consumers to give them a go.
In the meantime all we can do is to build in a scalable modular fashion, so that we ensure schemes meet their statutory duties even in the face of an avalanche of enquiries.
Delays or no delays, one of the things I like about large projects is the way they develop their own language.
I can stand next to an engineer in the office kitchen and find them enthusing about their cocoa testing. But of course that's not a hot chocolate beverage, it’s the conformance and compliance testing they must go through before the Pensions Dashboards programme will allow them to connect to the live environment.
Adrian Boulding is director of retirement strategy at Dunstan Thomas
