SFP
What you correctly identify was as a direct result of the 'Smart Procurement' (oxymoron surely) process introduced over a period of time from 1999 onwards. There was nothing smart about it. It encouraged individual PTs to go off and do their own thing (an idea borrowed from industry) in an attempt to find better ways of working. That part was all well and good, quite a few PTs came up with some really good ideas. The problem was that, in order for the other PTs to benefit from the good ideas, they had to talk to each other.
What you say is very true except don’t be fooled by Haddon-Cave’s assertion that all this started with the formation of “IPTs” and “Smart Procurement” in the late 90s.
It has to be remembered what the SMART procurement “rules” were intended to replace. The ill-fated and ludicrous “Chief of Defence Procurement Instructions” (CDPIs). Lots of bright young things were recruited to work on them in the early 90s, the common denominator being a 5 year old could see the authors had seldom worked on or near a procurement project. It was thoroughly dispiriting being told to dumb down, delay projects, dilute specs and waste money. Many of the “good ideas” you speak of fell squarely in the “ignore the bosses and revert to pre-CDPI mandated regulations” category.
The situation was highlighted to me a few years back when a particular ageny, one of the few that remained responsible for centrally managing a particular service to the front line, pointed out that they had found in excess of a dozen contracts, from various PTs, all for the same thing. The suppliers must have been laughing their collective t*ts off.
Absolutely right, but (in the context of aircraft support and airworthiness) this was a policy first introduced in January 1988 by RAF suppliers (AMSO) and continued by their successors, AML and DLO. MoD(PE) railed against it but by the time they morphed into DPA the CDPI kids were in charge of the asylum and the official line was supine appeasement (of Industry and Beancounters). The waste and inefficiency it caused, never mind the safety implications, was formally notified to PUS (the Chief Accounting Officer) in June 1996. He did nothing. A paper was submitted to DPA’s Deputy CE (3 Star) in January 2000 recommending how to fix the problems (i.e. implement regulations) but he didn’t reply either.
To be fair to many suppliers, while they did laugh their tits off they also complained bitterly about the waste, because they knew the MoD budget was finite. If they had multiple contracts to administer on the same subject, it meant there was less to pay for the real, direct labour – like manufacturing, design and so on. Instead of attending Quarterly technical meetings on one contract, they had to employ professional-attenders-of-quarterly-meetings on, as you say, often a dozen contracts which simply regurgitated the same stuff. I can date this precisely, because I left that post in 1993.
As I said, fully agree, but substitute 1999 with 1988. BTW, the first Integrated Project team was formed in 1989 specifically to avoid the above problems which were causing severe operational IN-effectiveness due to AMSO’s wholesale and criminal waste of funding.