North Wales Police outsourcing deal results in massive overspend

Re: Let's think about this...

EXACTLY.

I worked for a compant who had a fairly large development team but didn't see the value. they decided that the way to save money was to outsource the development to another company (lets call them SCS :))

One of the conditions of the deal was that the exiting dev team was TUPEd over to SCS with their T&Cs intact.

The company genuinely believed that SCS would be able to take on ALL of the development staff and carry out all of the development tasks for less than the company was paying its dev staff in salary...

They were shocked when everything went through and they started getting £150k quotes for a new web service (1 weeks work at most).... but of course with all of their dev staff gone they now dont have a choice.

Outsourcing just does not bring in the savings expected unless you are also taking a serious hit in the quality of service.

Re: Typical Result

I bet North Wales Police were trying to reduce costs by having fewer contract/project managers. (1 contract needs fewer staff to manage compared to 8 contracts, right..?)

You post the reason why but don't understand that's what it is

it allows them to move the location of the costs on the balance sheet

Manager with costs on their part of balance sheet reduces cost = cut costs meaning big bonus. Manager with costs added to their part of balance sheet = bigger budget meaning bigger salary. Everyone wins, except the shareholders.

Many companies have badly mismanaged IT that could be run for half the cost. But bringing in an outsourcing company won't fix that overnight, you still have to go through a lot of pain and expense to trim down the 1000 applications you use to the 100 you really need, the 20 different platforms to 3, fix your monitoring/reporting to get to the things that really matter and avoid all the noise that drowns out your ability to see those things, and so forth.

Doing that with employees who have been around for years is hard because of turf wars, so it is seen as easier to outsource as a way to get that done. Problem is, those turf warring employees also have all the institutional knowledge that smooths the way for actually accomplishing those tasks, so getting rid of them merely trades one type of difficulty for another and it doesn't get cheaper to go through the pain, just politically easier.

Myst a call result

I must have missed the article where the fire service gets better service from the please servus right

Or did you not print that one.-?

Theresa May makes April Fool look good. (Book my title in advance before I use it myself.)

Re: I work in the public sector.. I constantly fight against outsourcing

I used to work in the public sector. My impression was that management would rather believe consultants/contractors as they were paid a lot more money compared to in house staff. It had nothing to do with the skill or knowledge.

Yet they still refused to pay a half-decent wage to their own staff.

Re: I work in the public sector.. I constantly fight against outsourcing

It's not just IT that suffers from this. During my very brief stay in the public sector the Wise Ones at the Top decided to outsource a large chunk of Facilities Management to a well known provider of Facilities Management services. It rapidly became clear from first hand observation, and from talking to folks in other authorities, that this contracting firm had a very simple business principal: No matter how the contract is written, whatever it includes, anything the client wants is "Extra to Contract" and will be charged for at the penalty rate agreed for messing around with the contract. Everything, always, was Extra to Contract.

That was 20 years or so ago. So it is a bit soon for the public sector to have learned.

Re: (unnamed) IT contractor

Who? CGI?

Re: (unnamed) IT contractor

"So why are they unnamed?"

Probably to prevent injuries to readers from busting a gut laughing.

A client I work with has now outsourced much of their infrastructure management to 'XXX'. Prior to this, if they updated the application servers we integrate with, one of their support team would raise an internal change, speak to 'Fred' or whoever in their networks team, and new firewall rules or routing would be sorted out within a day, maybe two. Now the same work is outsourced to 'XXX', it takes a week or two, and comes with a bill of around £500 for every minor change, as it's 'extra' work. And that's if we're lucky and they manage to get it right first time.

Might explain why North Wales Police are finding their wallets a little lighter than they were expecting...

Re: (unnamed) IT contractor

I googled your headline to get answer and 2nd result is this forum! Gotta hand it to google , even if you dont like thier world domination plans

I think that's fairly standard with outsourcing.

New contracts are drawn up by people not directly involved in the services and they don't consult the people who actually do the job. So what gets put in the new contacts, does not generally reflect what is actually delivered.

1st day after just about any outsourcing....

* Client to newly TUPE'd team now working for new service provider. "Can we have XYZ please?"

* Team: "Sorry, it's not in the contract."

* Client: "But you did this last week/month/year, and it's critical to our business!".

* Team: "No problem, detail your requirement and we'll have an estimate to you by the end of the week".

* Client: "But we don't have any budget!".

* Team: "You'll have to take that up internally with your account team. Have a nice day, bye.".

AC: As I was in that team! (about 15 years ago!).

Typical 80/20 split I'd reckon. 80% of the real work covered in the new contract, but miss the other 20%.

Re: 'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, what's all this then ?

The suppliers said, "We thought it was a joke so we didn't take the contract seriously.""

Re: soooooo

some how government just does not understand that.

Re: Same job + middleman = higher costs

It wasn't always true. There was a time when doing almost anything in the public sector (including nationalised industries) involved layers of crap inserted by special interest groups. This system had evolved over previous decades with weak politicians repeatedly reasoning that spending a bit more taxpayers money was always easier than tackling the SIGs.

When the time came for this insanely inefficient system to collapse under its own weight, transferring those functions out to the private sector actually did save money because the private sector wasn't doing the "same job" and was probably cutting out more middlemen than it inserted.

Something similar was true in the private sector as well, with many distinguished names in British industry making so little money that they were actually worth less than the equipment they were using. The result here was asset stripping, where observant investors bought a company, sold absolutely everything, and walked away with a tidy profit.

Sadly, in both cases you are dealing with a one-off. Privatisation and asset stripping haven't made much *financial* sense for several decades. Opportunities for asset stripping are extremely rare and privitisation only persists in the public sector because too many politicians are innumerate fuckwits who have somehow managed to get degrees in (politics, philosophy and...) economics without actually being able to count.

No, they just took the relevant people behind the bike sheds and explained their personal ROIs would be a lot better if they hung on in there and OKd the contracts. After all they need somewhere to go post cockup.

Re: There's one born every minute!

"No-one ever saved money or improved service by Outsourcing."

every time we get a call from an outsourcing company we get them to quote....they bring along a nice presentation and "figures" (mainly in % or "will save per year").

when they go, I then ring and talk to the ground working IT staff and users at these places (Banking is a close community, someone here will always have "a mate that works at XXX")

We have no use of outsourcers, never will but, like people that claim they can beat our current Printer suppliers, I let them talk then send them the copies of their customers internal complaints figures

A large new bill for the Old Bill

Fat chance, the bonuses have already been paid!

Re: Motorists stay clear of North Wales

Alternatively motorists in North Wales could simply obey the law, then there is no risk of being fined...