Government pays double for consultants

[Mr C Hinecap]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/12/24/cnconsult24.xml

More evidence that we are getting a shocking service from EDS. They are robbing gyppo swine who cannot manage their way out of a large paper bag - with a torch. One or two good eggs on their payroll but overall, they are a gathering of 2nd rate consultants who are not giving MoD what it needs. I am afraid. Someone in contracts needs shooting - but we knew that :ugh:

[L1A2 discharged]

Long may it continue - long enough for me to boost my pension anyway :E

Definition of a consultant: a person who comes to your place of work, asks you what the time is - not having a timepiece on them, borrows your watch to tell the time with, then takes the watch away with them. Billing you £700.00 per day for the pleasure.

[vecvechookattack]

Totally agree.... I know one of the said consultants.....a chap who left the mob just 6 months ago and is now earning a small fortune.....good luck to 'em

[tucumseh]

L1A2

"Billing you £700.00 per day for the pleasure".

Agreed, but I understand many agencies who supply consultants are charging IPTs up to £2k per day. The figure you quote may be around the upper limit of what the consultants themselves get. I know a few IPTs where the majority of the staff are full-time consultants, doing jobs that £22k a year civil servants used to do.

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

Ah! but the Government committed itself to reducing the size of the Civil Service. They are doing it by both contracting out and buying in Consultants. The MoD was previously accused, mainly by the Treasury, of not being "commercial" enough in its operations. By using a consultant, that accusation no longer stands.

Something that grips me about having Consultants in is the way that they don't usually understand how the MoD/Military work. Instead of them learning our formations and organisation, though, we adapt to become more understandable to them. Them adapting takes time and costs money. Look how many Head Offices the MoD now has and how few "management" docments are drafted in JSP101 format.

[tucumseh]

GBZ
I fully agree. For the reason you mention there are now very few of the lower CS grades I talk of, but there are many higher ones, getting paid twice as much – especially in DPA. Most have never served at the lower grades and therefore simply do not have, and are not required to attain, the basic competences we speak of. This strengthens the position of consultants. Also, there is an increasing number of IPTLs (and above) who have no idea whatsoever what a given CS grade should be capable of. Their default position is to employ consultants in blissful ignorance that often they already have staff who can do the job in their sleep. On one aircraft project, one of my minor tasks was Risk Manager. After 4 years, and successful flight trials, my boss (non-technical) employed a full-time consultant to re-write the risk register as he didn’t believe that I could possibly do it. (Despite, by definition, most of the risks having been fully mitigated). And note, the consultant was employed to re-write the register, not take the responsibility for managing mitigation. After a month faffing around, the consultant asked me if I could teach him how to prepare a risk register. My observation that his fee could have paid for additional features in the aircraft didn’t go down well. Oh, and I didn’t tell him a thing. As an interesting aside, boss must have told porkies to get the money to pay for the consultant because his “requirement” failed the first scrutiny question i.e. “Why is (he) needed?”

[Mr C Hinecap]

My main gripe is the fact EDS add nothing to what we get from other IS contractors - they have wheedled themselves in between and now 'manage the relationship' it seems. They add at least 20% to the cost, put a whole new layer of administration into the process, get in the way and generally slow things up with no understanding of the business or the output ie projecting military power. They have sucked other depts dry and I don't want to see our world fail because they have their feeding tubes into the MoD.