Observer re government IT projects

[DirtyDog]

They know it.

When money isn't your hiring big con is a no brainer because their main purpose is to take the blame - if it's an Ltd in Leeds then the blame would fall onto the person who picked it.

I did a big project a few years back for a central government department, where the whole project team was done by contractors and permies.

Unfortunately, the permies did the costings and were about £7million out. So to get round that £7million shortfall, management paid a consultancy £12million to finish the project. Senior management kept referring to needing someone with "skin in the game", ie. someone to blame when it all goes wrong, even if it's more expensive this way.

[Churchill]

If you want evidence of the kind of damage that management can cause read "The Nimrod Review" Report by Charles Haddon-Cave.

[malvolio]

I'm working on a bid for a single government department at present, to provide a full outsource of their IT infrastructure. It's not a major department, about 800 users, and the technology required is not that complex. The preliminary RFI runs to 239 pages, with 17 pages of Service Levels (at least 40% of which are dependent on the customer doing something so are utterly unacceptable).

The problem is not that they hand everything over to the experts (if they did we could solve their problems very effectively; the infrastructure in question is less than half the size of our own), the problem is that they demand you meet a set of totally unrealistic requirements then want to micromanage everything.

[eek]

i'm working on a bid for a single government department at present, to provide a full outsource of their it infrastructure. It's not a major department, about 800 users, and the technology required is not that complex. The preliminary rfi runs to 239 pages, with 17 pages of service levels (at least 40% of which are dependent on the customer doing something so are utterly unacceptable).

The problem is not that they hand everything over to the experts (if they did we could solve their problems very effectively; the infrastructure in question is less than half the size of our own), the problem is they are a bunch of clueless muppets who don't listen.

ftfy hth bidi