UK West Midlands town finds five-year HR system deal is only offer on the table in pandemic-stricken procurement A West Midlands town has found out the hard way exactly how much sympathy IT suppliers have for public sector bodies disrupted by the unprecedented circumstances of the current COVID-19 pandemic. The Register's attention was brought to an anomalous piece of procurement justification published earlier this month in connection …
Councils rarely understand the commercial world, and the few employees who do, are not in positions that participate in the "negotiations"... instead, they rely upon bureaucracy to get things done - Which is the exact weakness a commercial supplier will "exploit".
It would be a changed world if these morons were held to the same standards as commercial entities, and legally accountable for the taxpayer's money they waste..
I've worked in the public and private sector. The only thing business does better than government is cover up its mistakes.
Businesses being this crap tend to go bankrupt with the guilty getting paid off, government gets you endless reports about how shit it was and the guilty get paid off.
At least with government the incompetence is visible
Councils aren't held to the same rules as private undustry, they're much much worse and make it very hard to get good value.
You can't go out and just find someone offering a system at a good price. Often there are only 1 or two suppliers in the market even if there are more you have to put the project out to public tender.
you can only consider those who come into the public tendering process. If a company with a good product, missed the tender and misses the deadline you can't bring them back without restarting the process, which may be challeneged by the other tenderers.
during the tender the vendors will often lie and misrepresent themselves, especially if there is little competition.
You cannot haggle or negotiate prices down.
Any deviation from the process may result in a legal challenge from any of the tenderers.
In the end you often end up with hundreds of man-hours spent to get an overpriced half working product from a complete shit of a supplier. But the process is so onerous that it's often better than doing it all again.
Not true.
This smacks of procurement incompetency.
You will find (and should only select) solutions where there is a reasonable field of competition. This starts well before a tender is issued, speaking to a variety of prospective providers about their solutions, speak to peers in other public sector about their solutions, finding out about the good, the bad and the ugly. Seek references from the supplier, but also do your own homework.
Then you let all the prospective providers know you will be coming out to tender. Give them plenty of time, give them an indication of scope - even get suppliers' feedback, keeping an open mind (you never know...).
Don't issue a tender until you know that at least 5 organisations plan to respond. You may well get some unexpected responses, but the ones who engaged early with you will know you (and you will know them) - a clear advantage.
Have a firm idea and a tested methodology to evaluate price and quality. Ask for reasonable and realistic things, be clear. Give scope for value adds. Don't try and devolve all the risk to the supplier, because less risk for you means higher prices.
By that time you will hopefully already know who you might want to work with and a tender formalises that process. Yes, there may still be surprises, but then the surprise may be a lower price or an innovative value add.
A bit of time and effort prior to the process starting will well be worth it.
(I have been a poacher and a gamekeeper in public sector procurement and know that it CAN be done well - with good outcomes)
a few years back the finance director of our government department had been courted by the sharks/consultants trying to outsource us. Suddenly we needed a best of bread HP openview monitoring tool costing hundreds of thousands, despite my requests for a far cheaper solarwinds solution being rejected for the last 5 years.
Our procurement team where all over it, our procurement guy liked to boast to me about all the offsite meetings he had had with prospective vendors and that he had chosen some tiny company somewhere as they had the best proposal.
Our procurement guy was ex facilities and had no IT background but an interest in photography.
Speaking to the consultant who arrived to install the overly convoluted solution (several servers for polling plus several servers for DB and several others for running the app), our procurement guy and the company MD spent most of the procurement meetings chatting about photography.
its fair to say the company wasn't chosen on its IT ability but more on its shared interests with our procurement guy.
Working on the sell side, admittedly for much larger public procurements, my experience is that when the organisation knows what they want to achieve, can articulate this clearly and create a suitable commercial structure the organisation gets good value.
When the organisation doesn't know what it wants, has not thought out a charging structure and flexibility model then they get shafted. Its easier for suppliers to put in a low bid that meets the poorly written requirements and then charge for all the things the client didn't ask for.
The only option they have here is to scrap the system and start again with another solution. They’re damned either way, but if the original problems have all been ironed out then I think sticking with what works is probably the best solution right now, albeit being the lesser of 2 evils.
It beggars belief that you have numerous councils of all sizes fucking up IT implementations??
Surely govt IT should be working on a straightforward IT/HR/Payroll/ERP/council tax/local services delivery etc system that - I was going to say work well but .. - is not shit. It does not need to be all singing/dancing single solution. All the seem to do is set up shitty procurement frameworks.
Local Government Association ??
COSLA??
Formerly the OGC (formerly CCTA)
etc.
A big of shared (compatible) services/solutions heft and purchasing power!!
To be fair, £1m over five years isn't bad. It would likely cost £1m to implement an alternative and then you have the licences on top.
The real question is why every local council has their own HR, payroll, finance etc. solutions rather than a regional or dare I say it, even centralised, system.
"The real question is why every local council has their own HR, payroll, finance etc. solutions rather than a regional or dare I say it, even centralised, system."
That is indeed a very good question. Invariably saving are identified by council officers who can start these "collaborative" processes. What fucks things up every time are politicians. Unless your neighbouring ruling politicians are of the same hue are yours they will do nothing to help each other. Lest your Tory neighbour be able to put out the same good news story as your Labour neighbour. Also councils are absolutely ready to commit to joint services, as long as their council is the one left running that joint service. No one want to be on a council making an HR or payroll department redundant to save money.
Yes .. there was an article the other month how new Unitary Authority Bournemouth, Chichester and Poole Council had good money go spaff up the wall to replace existing systems from Bournemouth, Chichester and Poole Councils with a single all dancing ‘integrated finance, HR and ERP system’ - toxic red alert words!!
FFS find what works - or in government IT speak “is not shit” - in your existing areas scale it up to cover the others and keep your in-house people. Wait for 5 years to see what you really need.... if anything.... or do shared services with a compatible other Local Authority with systems that s as already (just Fucking) work.
Shirley a common platform that’s functional to average would be better than hunsreds or authorities procuring their own bespoke systems. HR, Payroll, Health and Social Care, Services Provision, Statutory/Regulatory duties, council tax, ERP, licensing, highways etc . You all kinda do the same thing.across the country.. even in the devolved nations.
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