F*ck me! I'm in the wrong business
If this was the plot of a BOFH story, it would rejected for being unbelievable .
The UK's Ministry of Defence has awarded Boeing Defence UK a £500m contract without external competition to replace "fragile and ageing legacy systems" it had already been charged with swapping out as part of a 2010 contract. Any lack of availability would "fundamentally impact the UK Armed Forces ability to operate …
In short, Boeing is getting a new contract to plug the gap left by a system it should have provided in the first place. At £500m, that's a pretty expensive stopgap.
Sounds like an elegant negligent conspiracy to be denied which rewards fraud and non performance of product and program as contracted and agreed by client to accept and Boeing to deliver?
In an age where the government is buying 40m 3M dust masks "because they look like n95 masks" for £200m and the masks are not even being delivered, £500m is peanuts in comparison.
Especially when as a MoD procurer you probably get a bonus for sorting the mess out at only a few hundred more millions than the original contract cost.
When my wife’s university got a new student data system to replace the old one my wife who is BA Maths BSc CompSci rolled her sleeves up and wrote code for old times sake fun and to ensure the project both worked properly and the way as a user she wanted it work. A contribution not in her job description which pretty much got ignored by her employers. She did it for enjoyment and ensuring a usable system she would use going forward.
When my wife’s university got a new student data system to replace the old one my wife who is BA Maths BSc CompSci rolled her sleeves up and wrote code for old times sake fun and to ensure the project both worked properly and the way as a user she wanted it work. A contribution not in her job description which pretty much got ignored by her employers. She did it for enjoyment and ensuring a usable system she would use going forward. ..... Muscleguy
So proving beyond the shadow of any doubt, a true amateur easily eclipses any dedicated professional, Muscleguy ‽ .
It is a lesson very seldom learned ...... which is very fortunate whenever endeavouring as a true amateur in any dedicated professional field. Pretty unfortunate for all dedicated professionals though, but hey, that's life and life's a bitch and then you die. Use it to learn some very seldom learned lucrative lessons.
You know, maybe the ones in charge of the tender need sacking.
What planet did you come from? That is now how public service works.
The person in charge for the tender will first get a promotion.
And if he/she keeps doing the same mistake thing, then he/she will get a board membership during retirement.
Quote:
"And if he/she keeps doing the same mistake thing, then he/she will get a board membership during retirement."
What actually happens is that the person takes early retirement with full pension plus lump sum, then after 6 months, gets re-hired as a 'consultant' on twice the hourly rate they were before, then when that gig is up (usually after the press get hold of it) do they move to 'advisor' to the tendering company
Absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. Unless you're suggesting an EU company would do better? (In which case you must be trying to be funny given how they're even worse than Boeing, in which case I'd consider removing the downvote.)
AC because I am in a position to know exactly how badly EU companies try to screw the UK over.
re: "AC because I am in a position to know exactly how badly EU companies try to screw the UK over."
I think the poster was referring to the UK's EU contributions rather than EU companies. And the media's bias in stirring up the mob against one but not the other.
Regardless, the nationality of the companies is irrelevant - they're all trying to milk the golden geese, British included - the point is that customer is well aware of that fact, since it's been happening for centuries, therefore the onus is on them to ensure they don't get screwed, particularly as they're (supposed to be) accountable for spending taxpayers money responsibly. Unfortunately, MOD project managers have been outwitted, yet again, by people far cleverer than themselves. Hence the current £30B black hole. Maybe the government should add that figure to the civil service pension deficit; oh wait, there isn't one, since that pot is sacrosanct, and funded by by a(nother) magic money tree, courtesy of the taxpayer.
:(
Or maybe the MOD could just buy only what it could afford, within budget and on time. There's a concept...
A competently-written logistics software program shouldn't cost £500m.
OK, the contract probably includes servers, scanners, RFID tags, training, migration assistance, and support.
But still £500m is a huge amount of money for this.
Over the 6 years (I guess - it's nearly 2021 and the article says this is to be done before sometime in 2027), that would pay for 416 full-time people each earning £100,000 a year, and you'd still have half the money left over to cover overheads, hardware, and profit.
Of course that's because it's a government defence contract.
Whenever one considers the present plundering of the Treasury and the lumbering of future innocent ignorant generations with past arrogant debt and deficits, and with all of that being proposed and presented/sanctioned and supported by Parliamentary representatives, one does have to wonder at the worth of UK Ministry of Defence chiefs and forces, who allow it all to happen so blatantly on their watch. Or are you seeing a completely different bigger picture show?
WTF are they waiting on whenever everything is being so comprehensively destroyed right before their very own eyes? Secret Sealed Five Eyes Orders? Strewth!
J'accuse.
"WTF are they waiting on"
The next brandy mostly...
I honestly remember getting feel for just how out of touch that world is, on the very few occasions my dads work for the navy brought him into contact with "bigwigs." As he was a civilian techie, that wasn't very often noticed, but later he was part of the team who procured the new mainframe at Manadon, and there was quite a lot of kudos involved for the base higher-ups.
Navy dinners are truly surreal, and that's only the ones civilians are invited to..!
Some of the oldest, in so many senses of the word, institutons are ensconsed at the heart of our military, and the navy is the most obtuse.
But brandy, and port, but mostly brandy...
Anon for obvious reasons, and I have to be careful what I write ...
I'm not involved in logistics, but from where I am I can see some of what is done there.
There are huge legacy problems, some of which come from the historical issue of the different services all doing their own thing. It's easy to say "you can buy a logistics system off the shelf for less" - but it's just not practical to rip and replace everything "big bang" fashion just because of the scale of the operation and the wide range of activities covered.
Only last week we saw the official publication of the new Defence Support Operating Model (DSOM) https://www.techuk.org/what-we-deliver/events/mod-defence-support-strategy-launch.html which is a fairly large (as you might imagine) project to bring all aspects of support under one umbrella and try to get some economies of scale across all the domains. But it's not going to be a quick fix - there's a lot of existing contracts, some of which run for many years. And as already said, it's a mammoth task with a very large number of different systems.
It is recognised that there's a big problem - and there really is a lot of work going on to fix it. And yes, it is recognised that there is often a lack of complete enforcement of contracts for various reasons - as exemplified by the case in this argument.