The end of Planning Rounds.

[Bannock]

Smoke and mirrors or good news?

Britain Turns to Annual Budget Planning | Defense News | defensenews.com (http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120506/DEFREG01/305060001/Britain-Turns-Annual-Budget-Planning?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE)

[Jumping_Jack]

Smoke and mirrors

[Willard Whyte]

They might as well use one of these, £7.48 or less on Amazon:

http://www.magicdinero.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/magic_eight_ball.jpg

And sack a bunch of senior officers and civil servants.

For the religiously inclined there's always Big J:

http://www.bay-of-fundie.com/img/2007/8-ball-jesus.jpg

[tucumseh]

Of course, they could always revert to using permanent instructions which have never been rescinded, which require you to do the job properly! Last implemented in 1994.


http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc291/exploringtheblue/ltcinstns.jpg

[Widger]

Bernard Gray made a number of good points in his report on Defence Acquisition. One of those issues was the annual planning round. I agree with his conclusions, axe the planning rounds and you can probably get rid of a couple of hundred people on the second floor of the MoD. These people spend their entire lives, shuffling (usually to the right) funds to make the annual budget balance. Over the last few years, this shuffling has been 'what can be cut?'. It is a complete waste of time, money and effort and consumes many many hundreds of man (and women) hours. These people are supposed to be managing capability delivery and they spend most of their time just trying to adjust a funding profile. Not a criticism of the people involved, who are often, serving officers just back from deployment, just a criticism of the system.

[Courtney Mil]

That's all nice and clear, then. The ANNUAL Planning Round will be replaced by the ANNUAL Budget Cycle. And "it’s unclear how the MoD’s proposed ABC scheme might work". Sounds a bit like more of the same to me. :eek:

[JFZ90]

As is said in the article, the problem is not so much the process (though I was never a fan of the cumbersome PR process and comedy option deadlines), but the number of running projects, their funding requirements and the funding that is actually made available (not enough, then it is cut etc.).

What will the ABC process actually change? It sounds almost as if later years will be ignored??

You could argue the 10 year PR period only really looked ahead 2-3 years ensuring the bow wave that was invariably created looked reassuringly far away....

[tucumseh]

You have to ask what you want out of the PR, or whatever it is to be called.


Like many processes in MoD, there is a lot of effort goes into “higher” level activity, but little or none into the detail; and the devil is in the detail. The final output, from a procurer’s viewpoint, is surely a quantified statement of what the Services need, properly funded, so that procurers can then buy it and support it.


The 2nd floor people are what used to be called Resources and Plans; each Service having an RP e.g. RP(N). They have never delivered what I mention. They just don’t touch that detail – an extension of the Service aversion to detail.

One example. A truism of procurement is; to cost you must first quantify. That may seem logical, but it has NOT been MoD policy to do this since the early 90s. For example, in 1996, the RN issued a statement that it was not for them to quantify or state the FAA’s requirements, it was for MoD(PE); in doing so withdrawing all support from a Cat A project. This statement came about because the permanent instructions I mentioned above were no longer implemented, as they’d disbanded the department.



The natural outcome of this is that unless the project manager happens to be intimately familiar with the Service requirement (less common since Requirement Manager posts were militarised in 1988) then he cannot possibly make even an educated guess at the quantified requirement. What he buys may be too much, or not enough. In hindsight, the former is condemned as waste; the latter, when corrected, an overspend. Yet, he has invariably paid a fair and reasonable price for what has been procured.

A simple example that happened to me a few years ago. The Service said “We want quantity (TBA) of this kit, to a specification (TBA), to be fitted to (TBA) platforms; ISD required in 5 weeks. Cost - £1M each. They supplied just over £4M. Now, setting aside the fact that only a complete moron would have endorsed this URD, you could buy a max of 4 kits, but never actually put them to their intended use because you’d be sitting waiting for (TBA) platforms to turn up, installation design, embodiment, support etc. When I dug my heels in and declared planning blight (despite formal complaints from MB and calls for disciplinary action), they eventually said “Quantity 20”; and promptly agreed to a reduction to £2.7M total at a Screening Meeting the next day. The platforms were never actually stated, but the total cost would easily have exceeded £45M.

You get the idea. This problem had cock all to do with how good or bad the “Planning Round” process was, but the complete failure to apply simple, mandated rules and common sense. And what do you think AbbeyWood staff thought of senior officers descending on the IPT, thumping the table demanded sackings? Twats. And worse, the civilian IPTL, who’d never delivered a project in his life, rolling over and agreeing his staff were wrong not to let a £45M contract with only £2.7M in the pot (in the wrong year). ****. The processes and procedures were robust; but run by fools.

[Cpt_Pugwash]

As usual, Tuc is spot on. There have been a number of initiatives in the past to try to bring some realism into the initial budget estimates at the outset, but these have all been scuppered by the disinterest (with some notable exceptions , to be fair) of the guys in the RP branches on short term postings.
Just to quote one example from my experience, my section was once asked to conduct an IA on a project to fit NBC sensors to all current and future platforms across all three services. These sensors would take ambient readings and automatically transmit them via datalink to groundstations and other platforms. The integration costs alone were far in excess of the budget figure, and when we mentioned EMCON, we were told it was not our area of concern. The project was eventually binned, to reappear as a series of much smaller projects.