This will not work
 

Uproar as MoD brings in American giants to manage military procurement - Business News - Business - The Independent

There are so many things wrong with this, that I don't know where to start.:mad:

Sun.

Well if it delivers value for money and stops the corrupt 'jobs for votes' for way over-priced and under-performing kit from a certain UK technology giant, then I'm all for it. Not forgetting that more UK Service pers were made redundant than jobs that were saved at the technology giant to pay for the uber-expensive equipment program.

Sadly, I suspect that said UK technology giant will just buy off the GoCo instead!

LJ

Not much in the great scheme of things.
I haven't the faintest idea whether this is a good idea or not - and will probably not last long enough for the truth to come out ;)

What we need are long term professionals to manage procurement.

What kills most of our buys is scope creep. We get new people every two years who want to make their mark, so they change what the previous person has done. Result, back to the drawing board and most of what was done previously, wasted.

Not that the likes of Waste-of-Space don't encourage this sort of thing...

Can anyone else see the elephant trap in having two companies each running half the effort? Especially where there is both competition for funding and a degree of overlap.

It is not just £5m more but the difference between onshore pounds and offshore dollars. When Boeing provided software assistance for the E3 programme it was £500k pa.

As for expertise, I bet a few Des jump ship.

Any new approach can only look like success after the last decades of ineptitude, graft and self serving within MoD procurement. It would have to be amazingly bad to be any worse than the current shambles in terms of value for the tax payer and effectiveness for those at the sharp end.

but that doesn't mean it won't be....Regime change anyone?

Elephant in room.

Many many projects have been delivered to time, cost and performance with effortless competence. Many earlier, for less and better than requested.

Ask why MoD/Government steadfastly refuses to learn from, or even acknowledge, these successes.

And ask why complex ones can succeed, while simple ones fail.

The last time the PAC had a serious look at this, in 1999, they chose six test cases. Five failed the time, cost and performance test; one passed. Not one recommendation from the latter's Post Project Evaluation Report was implemented. Ask why. (And who).

And ask why we have to see a revolution every couple of years, each one expected to produce stunning results in a few months? And when that doesn't happen one sees another amazing piece of new policy. Perhaps the problem lies deeper and the effect of change slower.

Will this fix anything? No. But it may open a brand new can of worms.

Shame someone can't reorganise the way politicians work at the same time...

But then that's been a complete lost cause for over 60 years or longer.....

Hat
Coat:E

No reason why contractorisation will not work. Scope drift is indeed the prime cause of procurement pain and always has been. Just say No!

The predecessor of DE&S employed 32,000 staff when TSR.2 &tc. were chopped, early-1965. One group procured nothing but Army boots. Most of these bodies were established civil servants. Their Union negotiated, instead of a 0.5% scale uplift like last year, a change to the pension ("established" means pensionable) deal, to be inflation-proofed. Taken together with the then-unsackability of established public servants, the admin cost of anything-in-Govt. became intolerable: 25 years employment, 25 years pension. That's why contractorisation was introduced widely. When (for example) Bechtel completes a Task they will fire those members of the team who had survived Annual Appraisals, who will then port their personal Pension Plans to their next berth.

tornadoken

What you say is no doubt true, but why mention "scope drift" which is down to the Services, and then civvies in the same breath.

It's a long time since I did my tour there but to add to tuc's point I remember big, complex projects being delivered by one or two guys, and small simple ones being mismanaged by large teams. You'd like to think Bechtel will get to grips with that.