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What systemic issues would you change in the MOD or in the single Services?

Given that ACSC is pretty much the jewel in the crown, I’d suggest that it’s exactly what is needed.

Especially as CDS thinks it’s “too long, too joint, too drunk”...
 
I've certainly defended bits of the career system but that's a long way from defending all of it. Some things need to stay the same because we're an army and not a business but there's a lot that should be changed. It's not a simplistic binary "the career system is all good/all bad".

I don't think you'll find any posts by me about gaming the career system, unless you count the ones lamenting that there's a single path to glory that requires an aspirant CGS to do a handful of select jobs.

I think I’ve said more than once that uniformed Officers should have very little to do with the “business” of defence*; we should be concentrating far more on Operations than money.


*and neither should CS.
 
I think I’ve said more than once that uniformed Officers should have very little to do with the “business” of defence*; we should be concentrating far more on Operations than money.


*and neither should CS.

I mostly agree, although I think CS are appropriate. I also think a large chunk of staff roles would be done better if they were moved to the CS.
 
I mostly agree, although I think CS are appropriate. I also think a large chunk of staff roles would be done better if they were moved to the CS.

But that would mean curtailed careers for an awful lot of Majs, Lt Cols and Cols as they do the rounds of Shrivenham, Andover, Tidworth/Bulford/Larkhill and Aldershot in an array of fairly non-essential staff posts. You would also want to improve MoD CS T&Cs and pay. I've said it many times before and I'll say it again, remove the option to claim CSA when on a UK posting and the enduring staff cohort will self-select themselves into leaving.
 
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But that would mean curtailed careers for an awful lot of Maj, Lt Cols and Cols as they do the rounds of Shrivenham, Andover, Tidworth/Bulford/Larkhill and Aldershot in an array of fairly non-essential staff posts.

Yup. The added bonus of having CS doing the staff jobs better is that it would allow us to be much more selective about the officers we keep.
 
But that would mean curtailed careers for an awful lot of Maj, Lt Cols and Cols as they do the rounds of Shrivenham, Andover, Tidworth/Bulford/Larkhill and Aldershot in an array of fairly non-essential staff posts. You would also want to improve MoD CS T&Cs and pay. I've said it many times before and I'll say it again, remove the option to claim CSA when on a UK posting and the enduring staff cohort will self-select themselves into leaving.

Right. If you pay peanuts, what do you get? But we keep going around the hamster wheel of civilianisation, contractorisation, insourcing looking for a magic solution.
 
This matters because the exceptionalism ethos means that those on the inside claim only they understand or have an interest in changing the career system, so only they should have control of it. Like any public service, this isn't true, but also like any public service, it's the first area the invisible hands of the institution ensure they have a death-grip on.
I've watched for years the increasing trend to import external civilians from industry across a swathe of domains HR, CIS, finance and logs because MoD has this bizarre attitude that excellence lies externally. This isn't diminishing, if anything its accelerating.

Yet the overwhelming majority arrive, throw around some PowerPoint-ware, retreat for 6-9m to actually understand the business then find it's a lot harder than they envisaged and then knife and fork their way through changes. Most don’t really add any value.

I'm not wholly convinced that we don't have the people who understand the business and know how to make it better, they're just not offered the opportunity nor empowered to do so.

I'm watching two 1* SCS brought in from external consultancies making a pigs ear of writing and submitting a pretty trivial business case right now.
 
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My department, the Home Office, pays better than the MoD CS; that, perhaps, tells you something about how the MoD CS are valued.
I'm working with one of yours, he's....special. Will happily shift a narrative to suit an audience, slippery beyond compare and has zero EQ. And simply cannot listen to reasonable advice.
 
Yup. The added bonus of having CS doing the staff jobs better is that it would allow us to be much more selective about the officers we keep.
Wouldn’t you just transfer the problem to an organisation that is even less able to recruit and retain people of the quality needed?

@A2_Matelot’s last post highlights the problem with recruiting from outside; you are going to get the consultants and advisors who talk the talk.

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be about being more selective about the officers you want to keep. It should be about how you keep the officers who don’t keep you?
 
Given that ACSC is pretty much the jewel in the crown, I’d suggest that it’s exactly what is needed.

Especially as CDS thinks it’s “too long, too joint, too drunk”...

Too generalised is the biggest problem IMO, enough to give a polished veneer of competency on most subjects but with none of the understanding to actually fix problems when things inevitably go wrong. The battlefield and the boardroom are two different environments, which is one the things Project Castle is finally looking at.

But then this is an organisation that is only just putting people through finance qualifications to work in finance jobs as i found out earlier this week. :shock:
 
I've watched for years the increasing trend to import external civilians from industry across a swathe of domains HR, CIS, finance and logs because MoD has this bizarre attitude that excellence lies externally. This isn't diminishing, if anything its accelerating.

Yet the overwhelming majority arrive, throw around some PowerPoint-ware, retreat for 6-9m to actually understand the business then find it's a lot harder than they envisaged and then knife and fork their way through changes. Most don’t really add any value.

I'm not wholly convinced that we don't have the people who understand the business and know how to make it better, they're just not offered the opportunity nor empowered to do so.

I'm watching two 1* SCS brought in from external consultancies making a pigs ear of writing and submitting a pretty trivial business case right now.

You're answering somebody else's point, I think. I don't believe at all that 'external' as it is currently understood by the public sector is remotely best or efficient. From what I've seen, it largely entails paying about a £1000 p.d. premium to large consulting firms above what they could be paying those individuals directly, which itself is about £500 above what they could be paying them p.d. if salaried. That is batshit insane in many ways, particularly when (depending on what part of consulting you're talking about) all they are really doing is hiring a temporary SO3 with some measure of specialism, except they are inclined, at best, to actually listen to them rather than, as with actual SO3s, dismiss them as being too junior / naive / precocious.

I was simply saying that 'internal' has its own problems, as I described.

The answer is that 'internal' still needs a degree of external opinion or advice, but you need to look a bit harder and further than KPMG to get it. It exists out there, not in huge numbers, but in non-trivial quantities. The problem is that the same bias and blindness that means 'internal' can't see itself properly, means that they look for the wrong kind of 'external' too.
 
The problem is that the same bias and blindness that means 'internal' can't see itself properly, means that they look for the wrong kind of 'external' too.

I agree with this in part, although I think an equal reason for the poor choice of 'externals' is that defence just isn't a well-informed purchaser of those services. The VSOs commissioning the work have likely zero experience of the commercial sector so they're likely to be wowed by the flashy sales pitches and reputation of the big-name consultancies.
 
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