On 30 November 2011 13:00, Paul Bromley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ... The crazy situation that my PM tells me we are being
> 'compelled' to do is to let another contractor take on this work who then
> has to contract it to us. No doubt they would take a cut anyway and we would
> have even less.


I would be willing to believe that there is an explanation for an
arrangement as described which does not require any criminal activity
- payments or the expectation of employment by the company or
organisation that is getting the top contract there, but only after
I'd seen a careful description of it, and subject to later revision
depending on employmen patterns in the following years.

There can of course be perfectly proper reasons for people to  leave a
public service purchasing organisation and go to work in a company
they have previously dealt with - they have particular knowledge of it
and the affections they form in the previous working relationship may
be a sound foundation for an effective team.  But it is rightly
scrutinised.

Clearly for instance the movements between Wall Street and the US
Federal government have been an essential part of both for many years,
and career paths for NHS IT senior people which loop in and out of
Microsoft enrich both.  Both organisations one should be certain to
say.


I have some sympathy for both PCTs as senescent crumbling
organisations whose essential core try to accomplish their imposed and
assumed tasks with fewer staff, and for the remaining staff, those who
for whatever reasons have not found a lifeboat.  Clearly one expects
the least competent and useful ones would have been shed earliest and
it would be unkind to state the arithmetic indicates a reduced average
competence in the remainder.

But I suspect the wastage is going to start looking like Northern Rock
and other major crashes if it isn't already, with rising long-term
sickleave and ill-health retirement applications.  An alarming feature
of that is that the people least likely to become ill from worry at
their post are exactly those who are neither engaged nor bothered
about it, and those are the ones I'd least like to hire away from a
PCT if I were running a company or recruiting to some
$_AnteLegendaryNeologism commissioning group.


The last one out therefore may not turn out the lights, not so much
from the conscious decision that it is not his electricity bill, as
from not having that in the job description.


Weather in Queensland: Excellent.
Public mood in Queensland: excellent.
Government in Queensland: regarded as excessive, noticeably smaller
and less complex than UK.




$_AnteLegendaryNeologism
Need a word, can't think of one:  A legend is half history and half
fantasy. What would the equivalent for the future be?
-- 
Adrian Midgley   http://www.defoam.net/