Deloitte wins deal worth up to £100M for UK border platform The UK's tax collector has awarded Deloitte a deal worth up to £100 million ($127 million) to provide a digital gateway for businesses getting goods across UK borders as part of its strategy for post-Brexit trade. The global consultancy bagged the three-year contract to help design, build, operate and maintain "a market- …
1 ) How much will it end up costing
2) How long will it actually take before delivery
Actually More
3) Will Deloite ACTUALLY be able to complete it before taking the cash and handing it off to someone else to do
4) How many outages will we see/year once it's running leading to massive shortages in the shops
Deloitte will ask for a list of stakeholders, the system's specifications (and perhaps even key performance indicators), the government will change them every week, so no work will be done but billing for the consultants fees...
Then the Tories will be ousted, and the contract voided.
In the meantime, no tea will be imported to the UK.
Working with them on a project at the moment.
All oursourced.
Only work the outsource teams local hours, not GMT/BST
Absolutely shit coding
project currently delayed indefinately as the cannot fix any of their API issues (one "techy" did not get their head around oAuth and then was more confused when we told them the API we had built for them, and why it was not what they were looking at in the documentaiton. We asked them to show us the documenttion, and they were looking at the inbound API for THEIR product
I know a Director there and the main attributes that propelled him to these heights were the ability to read and write fluently in English (despite being Welsh!)
His job is basically shouting at Asian sub-contractors all morning while their time zones overlap and make PowerPoints in the afternoon to tell his bosses how well everything is going.
My knowledge of the Big4 in general is as follows:
- They have some smart people and some not so smart people
- Whether smart or not, most are quite overpaid, and more importantly, vastly overcharged in relation to actual experience
- Their insane bills mean they can often throw vast resources at some things that others can’t
- You might get a speed advantage as a result
- You’ll likely get terrible value for money
- The quality has a high chance of being lower than if you just employed real specialists in whatever field it is you want them to do
- So, as another poster says, you’ll probably rack up huge cost on middle management / project cost and pay peanuts / get monkeys delivering the actual product if outsourced. If not outsourced then the man hours at their rates will likely be far too low compared to what a specialist company would have used
So chances are this is another example of winning work due to their aura, connections, or weighty proposals/promises.
..to comment on this without swearing.
If you want evidence that our government is either incapable or unwilling to lift a finger to improve things under Brexit, this is it. To launch a three year (we know it will be five) project SEVEN YEARS after the decision was made is astonishing.
And the thing here is that ignoring all of the stupid politics around Brexit, there is a clear and obvious case for us to digitise our borders and make them as efficient as possible - we're an island nation that trades globally, why on earth would we accept making that any more difficult than is absolutely necessary? If there was a convenient time and excuse for putting some serious effort into it, it was five years ago.. and yet here we are..
The icing on the cake is repeating the usual big government mistakes - do it as one huge project, managed by a consultancy that lobbies the government hard for influence and has no track record of delivering projects like this to spec, on time or on budget (pick 0 out of 3). Set a deadline that is conveniently after the next general election and then retire early for drinks. What could possibly go right?
If it had been up to me, I would've asked the people promoting it to explain exactly what "Brexit" meant and how it would be accomplished before the referendum. I mean, whenever I have to present options to management, I have rarely been able to get away with "Dunno but it'll be great" as one of the options.
The point here is it doesn't matter about the politics of Brexit - at least in this context - the decision to fix or improve the system as much as possible of is still the responsibility of the government.
Whether Brexit itself was a bad decision is irrelevant. It is their choice whether to make the situation worse or better. More than that, they have had ample warning and plenty of analysis from both sides of the Brexit argument that made it absolutely clear that improving our ability to trade was vital for long term economic health.
So the question has to be why it has taken so long to finally come up with such a poor proposal? And let's not pretend this is a problem unique to the current lot in power. No-one from the current intake of MPs has made any serious attempt at addressing a clearly important issue beyond the usual political point scoring. Right across the political spectrum this stuff is embedded in our establishment.
Agreed.
We need Politicians who actually know how to run businesses and can produce realistic plans for improvement.
Get rid of all the MP's who studied PPE and went straight into Politics, or who studied business MBAs in the last 20 years (which just seem to be about refinancing to extract as much profit for the management, whilst screwing the workers and the business. e.g. Maplins)
And bring in people who have been pillars of the community, whether that be running successful businesses, or charities. Unfortunately, you will have to pay a bit more to get these people in, and the proletariat will not like that.
The lot currently in charge, would struggle to organise a piss up in a brewery (although a few 'high achievers' did manage to organise parties in lockdown).
The others, all just grumble about what is being done, but have no policies of actual merit of their own, with a stock phrase being "we will improve xyz, but you will have to wait until our manifesto at the next General Election for details of how we will improve it and how we will pay for it." i.e. no F*ing idea, but we need to say something to make the others look worse.
[I've dropped out of local politics. It used to be good when we were under a well run rural District that actually provided all the services, had significant reserves to deal with just about any unexpected event and had one of the lowest council taxes. Then the local debt ridden, town Borough Council went bust as it was completely mismanaged. A Unitary was formed out of two rural Districts and the Borough, which immediately snaffled the District reserves to pay Borough debt. Then the services amalgamated to work with "the lowest common denominator" level of proficiency. At a Parish level, instead of having District decisions and minutes, etc. being flowed down, I had to mine the Unitary website to find out what was going on that would affect the Parish, and many minutes were no longer published (in fact I did a FOI request for the minutes of a meeting that affected our Parish significantly, and no minutes could be found!)]
Politics and governance do not have to equate to incompetence, but unfortunately, it seems to be a fertile breeding ground that has been very active in the past 30 years.
Let's see how many times Deloitte has been fined in last 3 years for mismanagement, lax procedures shall we?
Oh dear, https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=deloitte+fined+tax&ia=web I don't predict this going well, unless you're the account team getting the fat bonus for landing the deal we the taxpayers will probably get screwed...
I thought that our crumbling platforms might be the responsibility of good old British Rail but on checking them I see "Welcome to the New National Rail Website! We're in the process of building a brand new website that will make it easier and quicker to find whatever you're looking for. We remain your trusted source for train information, so you can still check Live Trains and Status and Disruptions (including planned engineering works)."
So they know nothing about platforms - neither do Accountants,
1. It's taken 2.5 years to get from announcing the project to awarding a contract. The design hasn't even begun yet. There's no way they'll get all this done in 3 years if they're that slow.
2. "a market-leading digital platform" : what market will it be leading? The market for the digital customs system the UK is building? Of course they'll be leading the market if the number of customers for that product is precisely one, and they're the chosen supplier.
3. Just useless, clueless, worthless, stupid, reckless government. Oh, we'll only need some sort of adequate system about ten years after we've created the situation that requires one. Rotterdam had all their systems, staff and checks ready the first day they were required. But that's in the decrepit EU, not world beating zingy Global Britain!
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