It was a very interesting read and demonstrated quite clearly the inadequacies of the Civil Service (CS) to create a dynamic environment to meet an evolving high risk venture. I know from experience as I spent some time in the CS in the late 90's in an IT Division with the sole purpose to bring in financial and commercial practises prior to outsourcing by the then Labour Government.
Coming from industry, it was quite a culture shock, I quickly found why they had to bring external expertise in, best typified by a very thin main stream CS expertise in any given discipline/ profession, The CS is very good at producing generalists who can adapt during their career and may switch paths according to the opportunities that arise, some may switch from HR to Finance to IT. In general very few in a senior roles had the depth and breadth of experience and knowledge in their current chosen discipline you would find in a comparable role outside the CS. Even the project management tool Prince and Prince 2 is all about creating a process which ensures it always remains collective responsibility and no individual CS takes any personal risk...they are all risk averse.
I remember well one meeting with very senior mangers in which I was doing a presentation, it typified their approach to delivery of a product/service, ,my presentation, was focusing on delivery of the end product, towards the end of the presentation my manager pointed out that I suggest focus more on the process rather than the end product so I could not be criticised no matter what the outcome, if there was a good process in place. I strongly disagreed, achieving the end product/outcome should the aim of process.
I remember when the Euro was being considered and the impact of conversion from Sterling to Euro on the CS computer systems, the project team were recommending that the conversion Sterling to Euro rate should be able to go to 6 decimal places, (for absolute accuracy in the conversion rate) currently the systems could only handle 2 decimal places in the value (pence) , the cost in just one section of the CS, the benefits payment software alone, would run into many thousands of man years of programming effort and they were seriously considering this enormous cost of conversion.
When I pointed out that it was unnecessary to go to six decimal places as the CS had access to the UK Legislature and could introduce either primary or secondary legislation in the form of a Finance Act or statutory instrument to set the new benefit payments in Euros to the existing 2 decimal places, the lowest subdivision of the Euro coinage physically available (cents) and save thousands of man years of programming effort in the process.. They still recommended to Ministers the 6 decimal place change, knowing a Finance Act along with other legislation would have to be introduced to bring the Euro into effect in the UK. No wonder the UK has a massive track record of screwing its IT system changes and thank goodness the Euro did not go ahead as the IT conversion costs were enormous and probably overstated to support the case for keeping Sterling
regards.
Last edited by JohnHarris; 05/02/21 03:36 PM.
