Reply to post: Haven't got the staff any more though.

Haven't got the staff any more though.

The Government policies have basically removed most of the intelligence and the best programmers from Local and Central Government employ.

If we wanted something done for our users we did it. It worked, and if we could we sold it to other Councils.

Then the outsourcing came in and after a change of the original management team, who had reorganised themselves into a nice redundancy or early retirement package, the new management team perfectly matched the new psychometric test requirements, whilst still being absolutely useless at everything bar attending meetings and agreeing with the perceived main person in the room!

Instead of the users getting what they wanted, they now got "bespoke, off the shelf" packages, which saved all the high development costs.

The fact they didn't actually meet any of the criteria was glossed over as unimportant, until the "users" started going sick with stress caused by the new systems and it got into the press.

The trouble is that once you have lost the real talent, you are stuck with the dross and can't recover,

Hence all the bills went up and none of the systems satisfied the users, which in our case also lost all off the external customers we had built up over the years, who were paying "real" money into the Council coffers.

The old management team would not touch "consultants", preferring to spend the money on training in house personnel. The new team, being completely incompetent, relied upon external consultants.

We found the first problem was that the "consultants" hired had usually read the book the night before, giving them "expert" status in the eyes of the new psycho management teams and our local relevant knowledge was ignored.

We were always found to be right, usually 6 months into the project, which led to a management team led restructure, rendering certain people surplus to requirements!

The management team performance bonus levels went up afterwards as they could now pass the buck.

When I dealt with Central Government, I found they suffered consultants exactly the same way.

In fact watching the pandemic fiasco and the Government advisors, I see it is exactly the same even now.