One hell of a blow
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.
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 …
...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.
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...
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... ;-)
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
I've worked on quite a few large projects inside and outside of government and I'd say it was fairly rare to find a large one that comes in on time and budget.
There are a number of perennial problems that crop up time and time again.
- If the project runs long enough there may be a technology shift that makes the original solution obsolete, so you need to decide to either put the obsolete solution in or re-engineer. Obsolete solutions often need specially written and expensive support contracts, re-engineering can mean starting the project almost from scratch. For example, if you'd spent six years working on a solution based around using a Palm Pilot in the field would you go live with it in say three months time?
- Inside government owned projects there is often a lot of politics leading to whole departments not talking to each other. I remember a chap who didn't get on with the head of Data Processing (what would now be the IT dept) and so developed an entire service without once asking about supportability or existing standards. The entire project was scrapped within 8 months of going live.
- Customers often don't know what they really want until the project is well underway. Some changes can be swept under the carpet, but many cost money to implement; if you picked the wrong colour for a new car you could probably get it changed at no cost as long as you catch them early enough, but if you order a Mondeo and then ask for a Bentley just before you take delivery then you might find a change in both budget and timescales.
There are no simple solutions, there's too much politics in government circles and too much profiteering in private ones.
In addition to all of that, we have no concrete figures for non-government IT projects. I can't see someone like Starbucks releasing a report that says "We put in a new system, but it was 6 months late, cost twice as much as planned and still doesn't work", so there is nothing to measure against.
Looking at NAO press releases, they say that the NIRS2 contract provides good value for money and that the original contract failed to provide sufficient flexibility to allow for 1998 legislation changes and so had to be re-negotiated at additional cost.
For the CSA their conclusion was that the system was poorly specified, designed and implemented, but that the legislation was also unduly complex. So, I don't think all of the blame can be placed at EDS' door.
Is they sometimes (always!) focus on making sure that whatever 'solution' is proposed has as much of their hardware / software offerings as possible. Eventually, the customer realises this (this can take years however) and at contract renewal time decide to select a 'partner' where this is less likely to happen. Sometimes.
I can't see this making much difference. The major problem with Government IT is micro-management from the client. I've worked with 3 arms of the UK Government: the old Inland Revenue, DWP and MoD. Until 2001, we were left largely alone then, probably because Blair rightly thought he was unbeatable, his administration started interfering and telling us how to do our jobs.
I am so glad I'm out of both the UK Government and, for that matter, the UK - I now live in Germany.
I hope all goes well for the staff being transitioned. By law, they can't be made redundant straight away under TUPE. I think there's a limit of a year.
Time to polish up that CV in any event.
"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!"
Actually it is much better than that, HP will only TUPE over the staff they want to TUPE over (within the framework rules of course). So Fujitsu will actually be getting all the people HP no longer want.
As an ex EDS now HP staffer working in the Blackpool area on the DWP contract (although not in hosting) maybe this will give management (who are the reason for all the cock-ups) the bih kick in the pants that they need - and maybe get rid of a few levels of dead weight that we have been carrying around.
another post that proves the main use of the internet is for retards to publish their inconsequential opinion and all this from a self confessed cowboy.
The truth is you have quality staff doing a quality job being throttled by worthless management
If anyone on here believes its down to anything but cashflow then you need to wake up
Roll on the apocalypse
Hmmm Fujitsu staff too willing to strike, it's taken over 10 years of below inflation pay rises, killing the final salaries pension scheme and 1200 redundancies to provoke a strike.
Why don't you go back to reading the Daily Telegraph (or is it the Daily Mail) and check your facts while you are at it.
If the Fujitsu staff took a leaf out of the French book it would be burning barricades rather than standing peacefully with placards in the snow.
Every large company has it's share of wasters, inept and generally crap staff, sometimes they are all corralled in one particular site, sometimes on one contract.
You wouldn't want to tar everybody with the one brush would you?
I've been involved on a number of public sector projects over the last 15 years for 3 different organisations. Some have gone very well, including my current project, and some didn't. However, there is certain things that connects them all (OK not all of them but more often than not) and that's getting the client to:
a) actually agree what the requirements are
b) not change their minds a long way into the project and still expect the same go-live date depsite the change requiring a fundamental change to the design(usually because a minister has announced it in parliament)
Now I've also worked on private sector when this sort of this happens but in the public sector, no-one is willing to take responsibility for anything. Again I'll contradict myself, I did work on a veru large project where the requirements were very well documented and "set in stone". That meant that even when the requirement didn't actually make sense no-ne was willing to accept that fact. What's more I've even had requirements that described the expected solution rather than the business requirement. Again, despite the client agreeing that was the case, they still wouldn't agree to a change. Jobsworth? Oh yes.
So sometimes it's not surprising that very large projects go tits-up as the client often hasn't the faintest idea what they really want and change their minds all the time. Not excusing the contractors, senior management just see the billing as "a good thing" rather than actually trying to manage the client.
I'm way down the food chain (so far in fact that I actually do the work) and am always happy to argue my case, both internally and with the client. I'm here to do a good job for the client and provide what they need, rather than what they ask for. But it isn't always easy ...
Having just finished a public sector project I couldn't agree with you more (have to be anon for this)
You get a design hammered out and agreed to. Great wheres the problem
Then for the next 2 years everyone and their dog in the public sector becomes an expert and insist on many many (usually unnecessary) changes. Thy say "WE OWN YOU BITCH!"
This continues until the original project bares no resemblance to the original project.
.
At some point a new public body is included in the project despite their requirements having absolutely relationship to the project.
The business managers sing "the customer knows best" after all if the project moves to another company after completion they will be transferring to the new company.
Eventually the project mutates into something fuzzy that cant carry out the original task with the customer insists is what they really want.
3 months before go live the customer is dragged kicking and screaming to the final testing stage (they don't like actually having to do anything, the staff want the old (or no) system and the customer don't want to pay their own staff for "playing" with then new system).
Oops the system doesn't fulfill the original spec and the whole damn thing is late.
The public sector is not fit to have a calculator never mind a shared laptop they really are the worst type of customer
It was inevitable. The greed and arrogance at 'HP Enterprise Services' is sickening. The DWP must have seen the risk and probably Fujitsu were cheaper. Also it probably helps civil servants justifying their jobs as the landscape just got more complicated.
There will be more redundancies at HP and the tuped Fujitsu staff because of this, but most want redundancy as they are fed up with the false promises.
Mark Hurd this is YOUR fault.
Having worked with the desktop guys in Lytham I personally know most of the support/engineers and they are second to none in doing the job they do. Especially given the circumstances they have to deal with working for a company that values nothing but the share price.
All the planks posting about how bad HP/EDS are should actually get down from the fluffy white clouds they live on and try working with a government client.
Oh and for the plank posting about deskside techies in jobcentres newsflash they are Dwp staff not HP staff.
So, months of blindly getting rid of staff, saying publically that "HP doesn't care about the service, all we care about are the numbers" and basically treating EDS staff like sh!t has backfired and you've lost a MAJOR contract.
I wonder, was it worth losing $4bn+ of revenue? Was it worth the bad publicity?
I doubt it.
Why are they allowing these HP idiots to destroy a reasonable company (EDS)?
These are the people who failed to break into the Services industry because their "Sales-Centric" philosophies simply don't work in the service industry.
Time to hit CWJobs.
The DWP announcement is a farce and purely a political decision. The former staff at EDS have had 3 yrs of hell.
When Rittenmeyer and his cronies decided they'd sell up, they decided a cull. All contractors with fast experience were soon gone. Soon after a massive redundancies followed and Desktop Tower took a hit early to keep ahead of the game. Once Rittenmeyer decided to sell out he'd made EDS a attractive option. Big contracts with low staff levels. His propaganda of how the 'MERGER' would benefit everyone was a joke. He soon vanished into the thin air leaving all the EDS staff in a position of no pay rises, no training, no moral, no staff. Therefore effectively taking a pay cut due to inflation and working extra hrs for no added benefit. Then Mark Hurd arrived..... more redundancies, even less training, pay reductions and pay freezes.
So every person at HP who are ex EDS have effectively worked for 5 yrs in a down hill mode.
Back to current developments. Desktop Tower have probably been to good for their good. They are one of the best performing tower in terms of making money for HP. And also the service they provide to DWP, there are very few issues to report and compared to many areas the processes are smooth and efficient.
Unfortunately for the HP Desktop staff DWP possibly correctly have made a example of HP and their bullying tactics.
Many people may feel they have worked hard for very little reward therefore a change of employer may not be the worst news in the word
After more than 25 years in IT and communications and 10 with EDS its disappointing to see all the hard work and effort the poorly paid EDS’ers have put in go down the drain due to the HP acquisition. I agree with many of the comments about some poor deliveries but EDS has also achieved some great accolades and is no different to IBM Fujitsui and all the others in poor contract delivery in some cases. Im not surprised EDS lost this contract as the HP bean counters steered by Mark Hurd had no structure in there execution of headcount reduction letting good people go without even proper handovers. It was also obvious HP had no idea about service contacts and Mr Hurds bias to his tin shifters was very obvious from the outset. Shame on you Mark Hurd maybe you should loose your job too.