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

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.

Yep, that was essentially what I was trying to say. Tried to think of a snappy metaphor but failed.

I do know the question that pulls the curtain aside though, and that is: can you itemise the costs we pay above an individual consultant's fee for hiring through your company?
 
My department, the Home Office, pays better than the MoD CS; that, perhaps, tells you something about how the MoD CS are valued.
It also has enjoyed over many years a reputation amongst those of us who have worked extensively across Government, as contingent workers/ contractors/ consultants/ managed services, for an astonishingly toxic management culture.

And that was in place before Priti Patel arrived to improve things further :thumleft:
 
It also has enjoyed over many years a reputation amongst those of us who have worked extensively across Government, as contingent workers/ contractors/ consultants/ managed services, for an astonishingly toxic management culture.

And that was in place before Priti Patel arrived to improve things further :thumleft:

The new Perm Sec, Matthew Rycroft, is doing a good job so far and the Second Sec, Shona Dunn, is a safe pair of hands. Interestingly, they are both STEM graduates, which is unusual. As for Priti Patel, she's shaping up better than both Rudd or May, although I concede that that is potentially damning with faint praise.
 
Yep, that was essentially what I was trying to say. Tried to think of a snappy metaphor but failed.

I do know the question that pulls the curtain aside though, and that is: can you itemise the costs we pay above an individual consultant's fee for hiring through your company?
Is the MOD seriously going to Big 4s for bums-on-seats individual consultants. I doubt it; it’s not what the companies are about.

When you contract with a Big 4 (and many others) you are not hiring an individual. You are contracting for the company’s corporate knowledge and systems. The fee quote should clearly should the breakdown of hours, including the hours that partners, managers and administrative etc will commit to your contract.

I think you’d struggle to hire a consultant to fill an individual seat these days. You’d be in breach of The Off Payroll Regulations and IR35.
 
The new Perm Sec, Matthew Rycroft, is doing a good job so far and the Second Sec, Shona Dunn, is a safe pair of hands. Interestingly, they are both STEM graduates, which is unusual. As for Priti Patel, she's shaping up better than both Rudd or May, although I concede that that is potentially damning with faint praise.
As with any long standing institution, long-lasting, beneficial cultural change takes seriously good leadership, over prolonged duration.

I wish them well. Seriously.

At the very least one hopes they will be in situ longer than any CDS/CGS/VCGS: whose tenure in post gives them as much chance of changing the military culture as I have of rescheduling my wife's menstrual cycle.
 
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.
This.....nailed it.

You can take a VSO to dinner, show then an orchestrated demonstration then all of a sudden you're off and some poor sod commences operation commercial cleanup
 
Is the MOD seriously going to Big 4s for bums-on-seats individual consultants. I doubt it; it’s not what the companies are about.

When you contract with a Big 4 (and many others) you are not hiring an individual. You are contracting for the company’s corporate knowledge and systems. The fee quote should clearly should the breakdown of hours, including the hours that partners, managers and administrative etc will commit to your contract.

I think you’d struggle to hire a consultant to fill an individual seat these days. You’d be in breach of The Off Payroll Regulations and IR35.
No, they're typically brought into for say a transformation activity or to introduce a new logistics process.

That said I've seen members of the big X persuaded to join the CS as SCS grades and then run internal efficiency entities. With pretty mixed results.
 
No, they're typically brought into for say a transformation activity or to introduce a new logistics process.

That said I've seen members of the big X persuaded to join the CS as SCS grades and then run internal efficiency entities. With pretty mixed results.
Exactly. @Sarastro’s analysis of consultant costs is wrong.

I’d suggest that the issue of getting the right results from consultants is all about framing the question. The issue isn’t commercial; at the end of the day, the public sector can piss money away on consultants without much account.

As for former Big 4 people being hired by the CS to deliver, hardly surprising that results are mixed. Consultants aren’t usually operators or managers. If they were, they wouldn’t be consulting.
 
I’d suggest that the issue of getting the right results from consultants is all about framing the question. The issue isn’t commercial; at the end of the day, the public sector can piss money away on consultants without much account.
I think we've bigger issues. I've seen where the firms have been brought in to deliver an activity and told "this is the answer just deliver it". I've watched their recommendations and concerns ignored. All comes to your point they can be used without account and when you look back at the results years later "ah but X delivered that, their idea"
 
Thats not explaining anything. Please explain how Abbeywood is mismanaged?

And by the way they can be deployed, I have DE&S staff supporting some of our ships at sea today and in the Gulf on operstionsl ships.
He can’t, it’s a wankphrase that he’s using to play to the gallery.
 
I think we've bigger issues. I've seen where the firms have been brought in to deliver an activity and told "this is the answer just deliver it". I've watched their recommendations and concerns ignored. All comes to your point they can be used without account and when you look back at the results years later "ah but X delivered that, their idea"
I saw the same, both whilst serving and as a defence contractor. It’s largely why I walked away from the defence sector.

At the heart of the problem is the inability to partner. There are several reasons for this, some of which are outside the MODs control.

Bottom line, it’s very difficult to enter into a partnering relationship under European public procurement regulations. Until the UK has worked out its own rules, it’s still skewered by rules that are designed to regulate Italian corruption.

But in some ways, that’s just an excuse. The fact is that the public sector just doesn’t understand or trust industry let alone know how to harness synergies with it. The relationship is always about the contract, not the outcome.
 
But in some ways, that’s just an excuse. The fact is that the public sector just doesn’t understand or trust industry let alone know how to harness synergies with it. The relationship is always about the contract, not the outcome.

We're managing some smaller-scale stuff with the Analysis Support Construct, but a key issue for success there is having some stability, and having independent Technical Leads (working for ASC, not the suppliers or the customer) whose official job is assuring the work's fit for purpose but unofficially can be referees and relationship counsellors.

But it's not straightforward, and it does need communication. One reason it's worked fairly well (ASC is winding down, ASTRID is spooling up to replace it) is that the Technical Leads are (a) experienced enough to know what's possible, what's reasonable and what's taking the mick, (b) the TLs are able to push back against both industry and customer if necessary.

And I'm not sure how well it scales up, either...
 
We're managing some smaller-scale stuff with the Analysis Support Construct, but a key issue for success there is having some stability, and having independent Technical Leads (working for ASC, not the suppliers or the customer) whose official job is assuring the work's fit for purpose but unofficially can be referees and relationship counsellors.

But it's not straightforward, and it does need communication. One reason it's worked fairly well (ASC is winding down, ASTRID is spooling up to replace it) is that the Technical Leads are (a) experienced enough to know what's possible, what's reasonable and what's taking the mick, (b) the TLs are able to push back against both industry and customer if necessary.

And I'm not sure how well it scales up, either...
The people are always the key to success. Partnering relationships take time and investment. They also require the A-team.

The Army (and Capita) should have learned a massive amount from the recruiting contract, which is been turned around from collective failure into success. I suspect it hasn’t; I’m not in a position to comment.
 
Is the MOD seriously going to Big 4s for bums-on-seats individual consultants. I doubt it; it’s not what the companies are about.

When you contract with a Big 4 (and many others) you are not hiring an individual. You are contracting for the company’s corporate knowledge and systems. The fee quote should clearly should the breakdown of hours, including the hours that partners, managers and administrative etc will commit to your contract.

I think you’d struggle to hire a consultant to fill an individual seat these days. You’d be in breach of The Off Payroll Regulations and IR35.

Don't entirely agree. First, I don't think the public sector even remotely has a handle on how it uses consultants. They've become a stopgap which is, as far as public accounting goes, if not exactly off the books, at least much less of a pain to manage than the formal recruitment and procurement processes.

Second, re: the Big 4, but it also applies to the contracting industry as a whole and I've seen it with much smaller examples. Hiring the company's 'corporate knowledge' is always the blurb, but anyone who works with the individuals they supply knows that is not true. You are hiring individuals who, in most cases, could easily be you or your SO3, and in the case of the MOD, often were. The vast majority don't have substantially more experience, education or talent than those in equivalent Defence or CS roles. There might be a handwave of someone more experienced, but like with legal partners in large firms, these are mostly present for the hiring and presenting to VSO, and not for the actual work they are hired for (who, in any case, the VSO or hirers aren't doing either so doesn't notice). Some companies might differ from this model, but eventually it absorbs them too: McKinsey is a great example that trades on a brand that explicitly frames itself as being more exclusive than this model, and perhaps at some stage it was, but has become large enough that it is effectively just the same as the others except with a slightly higher graduate GPA. What you pay for is the contracting companies ability to monopolise the sector, because their size allows them to fund aggressive client and business development departments and soak up all the business that might otherwise go to smaller contractors, and this becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

In other words, the public sector inability to understand about commercial relationships you describe means that they don't understand (or care, for the usual reasons of divorced accountability and responsibility) that they are being had. Of course, they could always hire a consulting company to tell them that...

Third, IR35 isn't the problem, even with the recent changes and judgements it should still protect small or individual contractors more than hinder them. The problem is it's largely unenforced, because of an industry model which has become accustomed to being fundamentally explotitative of both ends (client and worker) because it never gets challenged. I've seen contracts or clauses fall apart rapidly when they do get challenged, but they don't seem to change the way the companies operate, I presume because so few people challenge them. It's like the Fight Club version of automobile recall decisions. If the cost of changing policy is more than the cost doing the wrong thing, they'll continue to do the wrong thing until it costs more than changing policy. Contracting, in a lot of ways, is basically the white-collar version of Uber or Deliveroo.

This can be gamed to the advantage of individual contractors too: I've this abroad where clients use contracting companies as a sort of recruiter - the contracting company tries to develop a business relationship with the client, but the client poaches willing individal contractors directly; the client cuts out 40% of unsupportable management and business development fees; the individual contractor gets paid more; and the contracting company discovers that their non-compete clauses and so on are unenforceable in the UK (in a large part due to IR35), and they don't know how or it's too difficult to pursue it abroad. But that requires both ends (client and individual contractor) to realise they are being had, which doesn't seem to happen so much in the UK.
 
The relationship
That's very perceptive, but not necessarily complete

If you're (say), Cap Gemini, the principal outcome desired is to maximise income, and it's up to the client to wise up and factor that into the framing of any contract.

That said, I couldn't agree with you more: too often in public sector work you see contracts unintentionally designed so they create parasites, not partners.

Caveat emptor.
 
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