Who is working for the army?

[craig1]

To put it into context, the story is complaining about a 0.5% project variance? If that's really the worst that they can come up with then I'll show them some 100-200% variances to get their teeth into, including many under the Labour government.

[MyUserName]

To put it into context, the story is complaining about a 0.5% project variance? If that's really the worst that they can come up with then I'll show them some 100-200% variances to get their teeth into, including many under the Labour government.

You'll send them your CV?

[jmo21]

I'm no fan of Capita or any of the big consultancies, but what is always missing from these stories is how useless the clients are, how they twist the knife trying to get discounts, push change requests through etc etc.

[bobspud]

I'm no fan of Capita or any of the big consultancies, but what is always missing from these stories is how useless the clients are, how they twist the knife trying to get discounts, push change requests through etc etc.

This ^

I was amazed that the government was stupid enough to moan about G4S and Serco because anyone in the game knows damn flipping well all those deals are worked on as win some lose some, with margins cut to the bone. I have heard anecdotal evidence of bidders removing IT costs completely from bids in order to win work. You don't do that without knowing the money will come in from some where else down the line...

It's time to make the following flat generalisation:

Procurement in government is retarded and needs to be scraped the the sake of all concerned.
Reducing the pool of talent to only SC/DV cleared idiots is asking for trouble.
If you think anyone will wait round for 3 years + of free consultancy to talk about a job and not rape you when they win you are a ******* moron.

Here Ends the lesson...

[craig1]

This ^

I was amazed that the government was stupid enough to moan about G4S and Serco because anyone in the game knows damn flipping well all those deals are worked on as win some lose some, with margins cut to the bone. I have heard anecdotal evidence of bidders removing IT costs completely from bids in order to win work. You don't do that without knowing the money will come in from some where else down the line...

It's time to make the following flat generalisation:

Procurement in government is retarded and needs to be scraped the the sake of all concerned.
Reducing the pool of talent to only SC/DV cleared idiots is asking for trouble.
If you think anyone will wait round for 3 years + of free consultancy to talk about a job and not rape you when they win you are a ******* moron.

Here Ends the lesson...

The whole thing around public sector procurement is just idiotic. I saw one NHS RFP where some of the pre-qualifying conditions for submission were so laughable that you have to wonder what company could or would want to meet them. For example, they had dictated the minimum educational qualifications of the staff on the project, all marked as mandatory. The programme director had to have a doctorate in business management or similar. The project managers had to have MBAs plus a whole raft of daft qualifications, IIRC it was PMP, APMP, PRINCE2, MoR, MSP and ITIL. The techies had to have minimums of 2:1s in Computer Science related degrees. The field engineers had to have a degree.

Then there was the rate card, it was about half what the consultancy would charge a commercial company. What the public sector don't get is that commercial companies take the higher charges and accept that they're going to get the entire tightly written scope at the agreed price while the public sector takes the lower charges and will get stiffed on every single minor scope change in the very, very woolly scope that's drafted in the consultancy's favour.

Then there was the seriously anal level of micro-management that unfortunately was trying to micro-manage the wrong things. For example, expenses for mileage had to be verified through a very tortuous approval chain, hardware could only be purchased through the NHS's "premium" partners who charge the NHS slightly higher than it would cost to go down PC World to buy desktop equipment, certain services could only be done through internal NHS CSU departments who have to competitively bid for the work.

It was truly a magnificent demonstration of completely missing the point about procuring quality services.

[bobspud]

The whole thing around public sector procurement is just idiotic. I saw one NHS RFP where some of the pre-qualifying conditions for submission were so laughable that you have to wonder what company could or would want to meet them. For example, they had dictated the minimum educational qualifications of the staff on the project, all marked as mandatory. The programme director had to have a doctorate in business management or similar. The project managers had to have MBAs plus a whole raft of daft qualifications, IIRC it was PMP, APMP, PRINCE2, MoR, MSP and ITIL. The techies had to have minimums of 2:1s in Computer Science related degrees. The field engineers had to have a degree.

Then there was the rate card, it was about half what the consultancy would charge a commercial company. What the public sector don't get is that commercial companies take the higher charges and accept that they're going to get the entire tightly written scope at the agreed price while the public sector takes the lower charges and will get stiffed on every single minor scope change in the very, very woolly scope that's drafted in the consultancy's favour.

Then there was the seriously anal level of micro-management that unfortunately was trying to micro-manage the wrong things. For example, expenses for mileage had to be verified through a very tortuous approval chain, hardware could only be purchased through the NHS's "premium" partners who charge the NHS slightly higher than it would cost to go down PC World to buy desktop equipment, certain services could only be done through internal NHS CSU departments who have to competitively bid for the work.

It was truly a magnificent demonstration of completely missing the point about procuring quality services.

You should have been I the room when I told the Procurement toss pots that I was able to completely bypass them because everything I needed was in the g-cloud catalog so we would not need an OJEU race...

I no longer work in government because I can't handle people that need rules to actively prevent them from thinking on their own. I also got tired of the way the old hands played the game to ensure minimal progress with maximum spend to improve their budgets. Until we seriously overhaul the whole process we will continue to call £20 bic pens a great value while the country bleeds the cash.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I'm no fan of Capita or any of the big consultancies, but what is always missing from these stories is how useless the clients are, how they twist the knife trying to get discounts, push change requests through etc etc.

^This again.

I used to work on the Libra project (england/wales magistrates courts) - MoJ is the client - which was £0.4 Billion over budget (and about 7 years) when I arrived God knows what it is now. I got to lead the re-writing of a particular (because I'd somehow inherited it) module which I thought was great at the time, about 5 or 6 years ago as a permie.

After a month or so of visiting MoJ in Petty France, I handed my notice in - I didn't want to be part of this clown parade anymore.

One of the aims was to re-write it more simply - there were about 5 ways of achieving the same task for most tasks, and they asked us to reverse engineer the business rules out of the code. I'd advised them to start that it will be a very incomplete list because the code was the product of 10 years of little hacks, and more hacks to fix a byproduct of the first hack - rather than the product of any kind of methodologically implemented set of rules.

Then They were insistant that because 1) they didn't know their own business rules, and 2) that each of the courts in england & wales use the system in their own fashion and have been doing so for years, so we shouldn't upset anyone by removing their particular path through the system, BUT we need to re-implement it more simply

Ultimately, in more words, they ended up asking for it to be re-written "the same as it is, but better". With no more direction than that.


It's because the MoJ isn't a business. There's no compelling business reason for anyone to have a pair of balls - with a bottomless pit of taxpayer money to fund it, having the balls to upset a few people is a career damaging attribute, so they end up with entire departments of apathetic pretenders going with the flow.

At the time I left that "in-court computing" system was still case of manually keying in the data, at a later date, from the pencil/paper records used in-court - because it wasn't reliable enough to be used in real-time. The spend at that point was well over half a billion.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Plus the suppliers used for public sector work, because the commercial demands are so artificial, tend to be choc-o-block full of employees who would just as happily work stacking shelves if it paid as well.
Full of lifers who've been there, or will be, for 20 years; while the talent comes & goes in the space of 2 or 3 years, realising eventually that they're where old devs come to die.

So that doesn't help.