HP loses massive DWP contract
HP has lost one of its largest outsourced IT contracts from the British government to rival Fujitsu Services. The Department of Work and Pensions today confirmed to The Register it had appointed Fujitsu Services as the preferred bidder to take over its huge desktop contract from 31 August. A DWP spokeswoman declined to reveal …
This is going to hit EDS/HP hard, I know the DWP work is one of their biggest contracts in the UK. A worrying sign for the North East offices of EDS/HP too.
Last time EDS lost a big contract, all of the staff in Peterlee were Tupe'd and made redundant on the same day. Worrying times for a lot of people :-(
It's just a *different* bunch of incompetents with their snouts in the trough.
Can anyone out there tell us of a *single* successful .gov IT project/contract?
TUPE should apply. Won't it be the same bunch of incompetents making money for a different bunch of shareholders ?
...all of which were shortlisted for Project Excellence awards last year.
National Grid - Planning for Success
Defra / IBM – Energy efficiency research project
West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership - Street cleaning tracking at Crawley Borough Council
The Rivers Agency, Northern Ireland - Strategic flood map
Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals - BloodTrack
Kent Connects - Kent Public Services Network
Leicestershire Constabulary / Point to Point - Mobile data
NHS / Concentra - Cancer Commissioning Toolkit
Norfolk Constabulary / enCircle Solutions - Intelligence briefing & tasking
Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel - Shared service centre
Ministry of Defence / Capgemini - Defence Travel Online
HM Revenue & Customs – Self Assessment Online
You were saying?
Hired some competent managers and insourced the entire operation.
Outsourcing is a failure of existing management to deliver services based on quality, cost, or some other KPI that the bean counters care about. If I were a CEO and the head of IT came to me with the suggestion to outsource I would fire him as he just admitted his inability to mange his operation.
If they insourced they could at the very least save money on the target bonuses, uplift on each salary / contractor rate, and every other upsell opportunity outsourcing allows for. Particularly operational transitional work. There will now be armies of £1,200 plus per day consultants from both sides flodding through the doors.
Come on Alistair Darling, I thought your were going to reduce our budget deficit through efficiences? Perpetuating these money spinning opportunities where 90+% of the bodies now go to the new company, and NOTHING changes in terms of service, quality, or costs is meaningless.
How many of those awards were sponsored by the industry groups to whom government contracts are awarded and how many of those awards were by groups representing the public and users of public services (y'know Patients Associations, Ctizens Advice, Charities etc)
Winter Fuels Payment System - Heard any complaints?
Real Time Pension Forecast?
Government Gateway?
ESA?
There are plenty around you know.
Anonymous 'cos I see the 100% avaiability Stats for 98% of core apps.
We also have a DWP contract, installing kit which has to interface with the network HP are in charge of: they are still absolutely convinced that our inability to obtain IP addresses from their network via DHCP is in some way our fault. Months of back and forth there, with angry users stuck in the middle.
Not that I'm saying Fujitsu are necessarily any better, of course...
BT Own the networks you fart knocker!
Can fujitsu be any worse than working for Hurd.....Only time wil tell!
I bet most of the HP/EDS staff get TUPE'd over to Fujitsu Services. If so it will be little more than a case of rearranging the deck chairs!
Fujitsu are in the middle of a massive reorganisation and cost-cutting program. The have just cut 1200 jobs, I wouldn't be surprised if the TUPE'd staff get pruned in the near future...
I'm hoping you're right, because while I couldn't give a monkeys about EDS or HP, the guys on the ground (in Lytham St Annes, at least) are mostly quite competent, and aren't to blame for the crap service. As ever, the problems arise on the management, political and commercial fronts.
Fujitsu Services will have some staff who are not on strike yet?
Same shot, different bucket.
Welcome aboard guys.
HP to Fujitsu?
Jack of spades for a Jack of clubs.
Wasn't it EDS who broke 70,000 DWP desktops, when they patched the entire network of Win2K PCs with an XP service pack meant for a small group of test PCs? That might be seen as a good reason to switch suppliers...
Maybe I'm remembering wrong though?
Someone sent XP GPO's to W2K, rather than the pilot XP workstations.
Yes, you are remembering wrong. Now please go and jump in front of a bus!
that is a technical impossibility! even the patch would quit saying wrong OS version.
It was a couple of GPO techies targetting the wrong machines, 5 years ago, and processes were (unsurprisingly!) tightened up a lot afterwards!
But hey you could of course judge the whole billion pound contract on one that one incident if you really wanted to be objective, yeah.
Judging from this comments page there are a lot of ex and current DWP EDSers who read the Reg... ;-)
And a lot of third party providers too. It won't be missed.
When those the wrong machines were patched years ago, what a carry on. Loads of us got drafted of our usual desks to help deal with all the calls that came in.
EDS was a joke then, I can't see much changing. The staff were great, but management didnt have a clue!
Been years coming....can fujitsu be any worse then working for Hurd?
Another nail in Hp's coffin. Next?
Is this the same Fujitsu whose nice and kind treatment of their staff caused them to go on strike?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/07/fujitsu_strike/
Presumably now they've got a new contract they'll be re-hiring all the people they sacked..
Oh wait a minute, did someone mention TUPE?
Hopefully this will be another indicator the shareholders that Mark Hurd's cuts have not been beneficial to the company in the long run.
EDS never managed to deliver a working project on time and on budget, even though HP are now in charge it's probably a good idea to change providers after the absolute failure of EDS to be good at anything...
Not true. Wanna see my CV? Loads of successes, couple of fails, no exaggerations
EDS stand up alongside every other supplier. Win some lose some.
The issue is that HP bought EDS and then think they can run it like a Schenzen printer factory with no staff or customer backlash
EDS to Fujitsu....
Same old same old....
Is there no one else able to do this scale of work? Properly that is...
So since the contract is being re-negotiated, are the government going to ensure a no-strike clause in it?
I am not completely against unions, but they strike too easily in this country, its like they have taken a leaf out of France's union book.
The unions who have called the first ever strikes in IT?
Do facts scare you at all Jeremy? Please enlighten us all with a summary of National IT Strikes in the UK. Shouldn't take long and you can write it in crayon if you like.
My service at Fujitsu is veerry long and I seem to be on my first strike, despite being in the union all that time. Did I miss something?
EDS staff morale is so low in HP that you'd struggle to find anyone at peon level that gives a rat's arse that we've lost this. Fujitsu can't be much worse than HP.
There are some excellent people in Desktop and SLAs have been good. HP and it's money grabbing, profit at all costs, hard sell on kit attitude lost this deal not them. That and the fact that DWP didn't spend a fortune on segregating the contract out to get locked into one supplier. Particularly a supplier that is desperate to tie them down on hardware and not particular subtle about the way they go about it.
Paris because Hurd's got more chance of pulling her than he has pulling hardware business through on DWP
Wasn't the huge DWP contract the only real reason for the EDS buyout?
Now HP are saddled with a weight around their shoulders, which they will respond with by massive job cuts.
Like it wasn't bad enough.
The way that EDS/HP have treated their staff, I am not supprised with the DWP opting to go with someone else, with potentially less risk. A risk that EDS/HP had an opportunity to extinguish very early on, but instead threatened loss of jobs to call off strike action. Honestly don't think that fujitsu could be any worse.
Although, suspect that management definitely won't be taking any responsibility for losing the contract, and probably suggest that the only reason they lost it was due to the high bid, or blame the union members threatening to go on strike. I think that HP were probably also counting how many machines they would have been able to sell, rather than focusing on what the customer wanted. Happy staff, provide service to happy customers, it is pretty simple. Cost is a factor, but would be supprised if this is all that DWP took into account, or was their main reason for not renewing the contract with EDS/HP.
If you have unhappy staff and treat them like complete idiots, you are going to loose contracts. The thing is that at least most of the people will most probably transition, because fujitsu will most probably still need bodies with knowledge of the environment, except now they have new managers.
Here in the states we have learned that EDS is pure hell as so is BAH.
Happy they lost it.
So everyone start working for Fijitsu.
New job same faces.
Well with the same people occupying the same jobs and answering the same phones, it may not be obvious, but I'll let you into a secret. The key is they all get new email addresses. They all change from joe.bloggs@oldcorp.co.uk to joe.bloggs@newciorp.co.uk and nothing else changes. Plus ca change, plus le meme chose (someone sort out our French for us please)
I doubt 70-odd helpdesk staff who work in the EDS office block are going to be able to answer those same phone calls from the same desk.
Nor will they all want to move to wherever Fujitsu's offices are, unless they are local.
When I worked at Fujitsu, as a temp on £7.00 per hour (and that was generous by their standards), I always assumed they were no better or worse than the other big outsourcing outfilts.
You don't retain decent staff by paying that kind of money, and those that remain are either demoralised or useless or both.
On the last contract I worked on, for a prominent regulator, Fujitsu implemented a hot desking environment. The desk booking software hadn't been properly stress tested so it would crash every Monday morning when everyone was trying to book a desk. The laptops that were issued to everyone had a tendency to blue screen randomly or to hang while booting up, despite them being a standardised build that was supposedly tested beforehand.
That said, I went to a job search workshop at the Jobcentre plus in Catford last autumn and having watched a deskside tech faff about with a projector connected to a laptop (which he eventually got to work by pressing keys at random), I would say the level of incompetence is pretty near that of Fujitsu already.
With the obvous point that he had a job and you didn't. Good job you're not posting under your own name really.
If you're not getting the right pay, either skill up and change jobs or work harder
All these providers are as bad as each other. Fujitsu wont be any better than HP. Insourcing is the way to go. Hiring external companies to look after your assets when they have no real interest in your organisations success is a mistake. The only people that really suffer from these outsourcing deals are the users stuck in the middle between their own organisation trying to squeeze their suppliers on price and the supplier doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. Fujitsu will have gone in with a extremely low price to get the contract and will then drown DWP with expensive change controls no doubt!
FJ taking the DWP is good news for us.
Work = Go on strike.
Pensions = Close it down.
Will service get any better, probably not, no spare capacity in field engineers, onsite staff will TUPE so no change there.
Give it a year and wait for our local head hunter to get his axe sharpened.
An impressive list. I note they all seem to have fairly limited functions and / or geographic coverage.
But most of all I wonder what *all* of them together add up to. Only if they *together* add up to a *fairly* small fraction of this contract even if *all* of them were on budget a *very* small overrun on this (Even if desktops are 10% of £4.5 Bn that's still 450m) to make the good, well run project costs simply *irrelevant*. Everything saved has been lost.
It's good to be reminded that some UK IT public sector IT work is done on time and budget (or at least one of those) hence the tuhmbs up. But it *never* seems to be the big ones, NIRS 2, The CSA (Was that also around £450m at the end?), assorted monster MoD projects and of course the NHS national Programme for IT (£3.5bn ->£12bn and how many years late?).
And if I were a UK taxpayer, that's what would bother me.
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