HP loses massive DWP contract HP has lost one of its largest outsourced IT contracts from the British government to rival Fujitsu Services. The Department of Work and Pensions today confirmed to The Register it had appointed Fujitsu Services as the preferred bidder to take over its huge desktop contract from 31 August. A DWP spokeswoman declined to reveal …
...all of which were shortlisted for Project Excellence awards last year.
National Grid - Planning for Success
Defra / IBM – Energy efficiency research project
West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership - Street cleaning tracking at Crawley Borough Council
The Rivers Agency, Northern Ireland - Strategic flood map
Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals - BloodTrack
Kent Connects - Kent Public Services Network
Leicestershire Constabulary / Point to Point - Mobile data
NHS / Concentra - Cancer Commissioning Toolkit
Norfolk Constabulary / enCircle Solutions - Intelligence briefing & tasking
Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel - Shared service centre
Ministry of Defence / Capgemini - Defence Travel Online
HM Revenue & Customs – Self Assessment Online
You were saying?
Hired some competent managers and insourced the entire operation.
Outsourcing is a failure of existing management to deliver services based on quality, cost, or some other KPI that the bean counters care about. If I were a CEO and the head of IT came to me with the suggestion to outsource I would fire him as he just admitted his inability to mange his operation.
If they insourced they could at the very least save money on the target bonuses, uplift on each salary / contractor rate, and every other upsell opportunity outsourcing allows for. Particularly operational transitional work. There will now be armies of £1,200 plus per day consultants from both sides flodding through the doors.
Come on Alistair Darling, I thought your were going to reduce our budget deficit through efficiences? Perpetuating these money spinning opportunities where 90+% of the bodies now go to the new company, and NOTHING changes in terms of service, quality, or costs is meaningless.
We also have a DWP contract, installing kit which has to interface with the network HP are in charge of: they are still absolutely convinced that our inability to obtain IP addresses from their network via DHCP is in some way our fault. Months of back and forth there, with angry users stuck in the middle.
Not that I'm saying Fujitsu are necessarily any better, of course...
It was a couple of GPO techies targetting the wrong machines, 5 years ago, and processes were (unsurprisingly!) tightened up a lot afterwards!
But hey you could of course judge the whole billion pound contract on one that one incident if you really wanted to be objective, yeah.
Judging from this comments page there are a lot of ex and current DWP EDSers who read the Reg... ;-)
Is this the same Fujitsu whose nice and kind treatment of their staff caused them to go on strike?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/07/fujitsu_strike/
Presumably now they've got a new contract they'll be re-hiring all the people they sacked..
Oh wait a minute, did someone mention TUPE?
Do facts scare you at all Jeremy? Please enlighten us all with a summary of National IT Strikes in the UK. Shouldn't take long and you can write it in crayon if you like.
My service at Fujitsu is veerry long and I seem to be on my first strike, despite being in the union all that time. Did I miss something?
EDS staff morale is so low in HP that you'd struggle to find anyone at peon level that gives a rat's arse that we've lost this. Fujitsu can't be much worse than HP.
There are some excellent people in Desktop and SLAs have been good. HP and it's money grabbing, profit at all costs, hard sell on kit attitude lost this deal not them. That and the fact that DWP didn't spend a fortune on segregating the contract out to get locked into one supplier. Particularly a supplier that is desperate to tie them down on hardware and not particular subtle about the way they go about it.
Paris because Hurd's got more chance of pulling her than he has pulling hardware business through on DWP
The way that EDS/HP have treated their staff, I am not supprised with the DWP opting to go with someone else, with potentially less risk. A risk that EDS/HP had an opportunity to extinguish very early on, but instead threatened loss of jobs to call off strike action. Honestly don't think that fujitsu could be any worse.
Although, suspect that management definitely won't be taking any responsibility for losing the contract, and probably suggest that the only reason they lost it was due to the high bid, or blame the union members threatening to go on strike. I think that HP were probably also counting how many machines they would have been able to sell, rather than focusing on what the customer wanted. Happy staff, provide service to happy customers, it is pretty simple. Cost is a factor, but would be supprised if this is all that DWP took into account, or was their main reason for not renewing the contract with EDS/HP.
If you have unhappy staff and treat them like complete idiots, you are going to loose contracts. The thing is that at least most of the people will most probably transition, because fujitsu will most probably still need bodies with knowledge of the environment, except now they have new managers.
Well with the same people occupying the same jobs and answering the same phones, it may not be obvious, but I'll let you into a secret. The key is they all get new email addresses. They all change from joe.bloggs@oldcorp.co.uk to joe.bloggs@newciorp.co.uk and nothing else changes. Plus ca change, plus le meme chose (someone sort out our French for us please)
When I worked at Fujitsu, as a temp on £7.00 per hour (and that was generous by their standards), I always assumed they were no better or worse than the other big outsourcing outfilts.
You don't retain decent staff by paying that kind of money, and those that remain are either demoralised or useless or both.
On the last contract I worked on, for a prominent regulator, Fujitsu implemented a hot desking environment. The desk booking software hadn't been properly stress tested so it would crash every Monday morning when everyone was trying to book a desk. The laptops that were issued to everyone had a tendency to blue screen randomly or to hang while booting up, despite them being a standardised build that was supposedly tested beforehand.
That said, I went to a job search workshop at the Jobcentre plus in Catford last autumn and having watched a deskside tech faff about with a projector connected to a laptop (which he eventually got to work by pressing keys at random), I would say the level of incompetence is pretty near that of Fujitsu already.
All these providers are as bad as each other. Fujitsu wont be any better than HP. Insourcing is the way to go. Hiring external companies to look after your assets when they have no real interest in your organisations success is a mistake. The only people that really suffer from these outsourcing deals are the users stuck in the middle between their own organisation trying to squeeze their suppliers on price and the supplier doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. Fujitsu will have gone in with a extremely low price to get the contract and will then drown DWP with expensive change controls no doubt!
An impressive list. I note they all seem to have fairly limited functions and / or geographic coverage.
But most of all I wonder what *all* of them together add up to. Only if they *together* add up to a *fairly* small fraction of this contract even if *all* of them were on budget a *very* small overrun on this (Even if desktops are 10% of £4.5 Bn that's still 450m) to make the good, well run project costs simply *irrelevant*. Everything saved has been lost.
It's good to be reminded that some UK IT public sector IT work is done on time and budget (or at least one of those) hence the tuhmbs up. But it *never* seems to be the big ones, NIRS 2, The CSA (Was that also around £450m at the end?), assorted monster MoD projects and of course the NHS national Programme for IT (£3.5bn ->£12bn and how many years late?).
And if I were a UK taxpayer, that's what would bother me.
I've worked on quite a few large projects inside and outside of government and I'd say it was fairly rare to find a large one that comes in on time and budget.
There are a number of perennial problems that crop up time and time again.
- If the project runs long enough there may be a technology shift that makes the original solution obsolete, so you need to decide to either put the obsolete solution in or re-engineer. Obsolete solutions often need specially written and expensive support contracts, re-engineering can mean starting the project almost from scratch. For example, if you'd spent six years working on a solution based around using a Palm Pilot in the field would you go live with it in say three months time?
- Inside government owned projects there is often a lot of politics leading to whole departments not talking to each other. I remember a chap who didn't get on with the head of Data Processing (what would now be the IT dept) and so developed an entire service without once asking about supportability or existing standards. The entire project was scrapped within 8 months of going live.
- Customers often don't know what they really want until the project is well underway. Some changes can be swept under the carpet, but many cost money to implement; if you picked the wrong colour for a new car you could probably get it changed at no cost as long as you catch them early enough, but if you order a Mondeo and then ask for a Bentley just before you take delivery then you might find a change in both budget and timescales.
There are no simple solutions, there's too much politics in government circles and too much profiteering in private ones.
In addition to all of that, we have no concrete figures for non-government IT projects. I can't see someone like Starbucks releasing a report that says "We put in a new system, but it was 6 months late, cost twice as much as planned and still doesn't work", so there is nothing to measure against.
Looking at NAO press releases, they say that the NIRS2 contract provides good value for money and that the original contract failed to provide sufficient flexibility to allow for 1998 legislation changes and so had to be re-negotiated at additional cost.
For the CSA their conclusion was that the system was poorly specified, designed and implemented, but that the legislation was also unduly complex. So, I don't think all of the blame can be placed at EDS' door.
Is they sometimes (always!) focus on making sure that whatever 'solution' is proposed has as much of their hardware / software offerings as possible. Eventually, the customer realises this (this can take years however) and at contract renewal time decide to select a 'partner' where this is less likely to happen. Sometimes.
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