Mr Mustard (mrmustard@zoho.com): kiss

11 July 2012

Costs and consequences of a One Barnet Commissioning Council

Mr Mustard has permission to reproduce this report.

If you don't have the time to read it all councillors just take a peek at page 7 "the consequences for Councillors" - you are going to be impotent once all these big One Barnet contracts are awarded and it is you who will have to take the flak for stuff that goes wrong and it will be a nightmare and expensive to fix. Have you checked how the parking contract with NSL is going? Accordingly to my lady friend Miss Feezance it is going badly, take a look here, NSL are not providing paperwork to PATAS. Perhaps you could have a look and let Mr Mustard know as that might be quicker than him waiting for an answer to his FOI request of 7 June 2012 (#1296 about NSL invoices & Key Performance Indicators for May 2012) which is now overdue.

Also take a look at page 18. Mr Mustard wrote to Cllr Dean Cohen today suggesting some simplification of the charges for parking permits and advocating the KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid). Didn't I hear you talking about that recently as well Cllr Hugh Rayner, but you were too coy to use the word stupid. Well, tell Mr Mustard, does that table look simple? No. It is bonkers for a council that can't manage to even issue purchase orders properly.

Look at the Leadership Matrix on page 19. Would you follow Nick Walkley into battle? Does he inspire you? Is he a great leader?

Don't you think councillors that it is time you stopped all this One Barnet nonsense, chucked out Agilisys and started to look at the nuts and bolts yourself?; there is about £9m worth of senior management who you could put to work. The devil is always in the detail. There is so much superfluous detail at Barnet Council it is impossible to see the wood for the trees.

Are you really in charge councillors? Don't answer that last question. It is too embarrassing for you.

In APSE isn't to your liking councillors might listen to what Conservative MP Liddell Grainger has to say about outsourcing in his neck of the woods

Somerset West and Sedgemoor talking about IBM and the Strategic partnership known as Southwest One.

“The company has recorded chronic losses in every year of trading and has failed to do what its creators promised - namely save any significant public money. Instead it squandered cash on a computer system that still isn't working properly and continues to overcharge Somerset County Council and other "partners" for so-called services.

Somerset Council has now caved in to FoI requests and published the bids:

Supplier / Bid	Total cost over 10 years
BT Standard bid	£220.552M
BT Variant Bid	£248.055M
Capita Standard Bid	£256.671M
Capita Variant Bid	£267.687M
IBM Standard Bid	£253.820M
IBM Variant Bid	£253.820M

“BT came in almost £34 million cheaper than IBM on the standard bid - and very nearly £6 million cheaper on the "variant" bid - the projected cost of the grandiose extras the customer (Alan Jones) fancied. Capita's approach was to pitch ridiculously high, like a builder who doesn't really want the work at all. But the fascinating thing about this table of statistics is the IBM tactic. There is no difference whatsoever between their standard and variant bids. In other words IBM seemed to be prepared to keep the price the same whatever nutty bolt-on extras the customer wanted. Jones had asked for an "iconic" HQ for South West One, for example, to be built in Taunton. Needless to say IBM never provided it. They were promising the moon for the same price as an ordinary product.”

You can read his full article here

If it went wrong there, why would it go right in Barnet? and what is the backup plan? Every sensible company has a disaster recovery plan.

In Barnet we are walking the high wire without a safety net.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

23 June 2012

The Council create extra FOI requests

Budget and Performance Overview and Scrutiny Committee 24 April 2012

and they also don't seem to be able to quickly respond to a simple enquiry about One Barnet.

-----Original Message-----

From: Mr Mustard

Sent: 21 June 2012 11:24

To: Gowan, Ed

cc: Travers, Andrew

Subject: One Barnet Programme Highlight Report presented to B&P O&S Committee on 24 April 2012. ( my ref #1308)

Dear Mr Gowan

I refer to the final page of your report headed "Programme Savings"

Can you please tell me why the figures for 2010/11 are still provisional at this stage some 15 months after that council year finished.

Please can you give me a breakdown by council tax year of the total Base Budget Savings to date of £5.82m

Yours sincerely

Mr Mustard

Dear Mr Mustard

Thank you for your email. We will now respond with the information you request in line with the Freedom of Information Act.

To this end, I am passing your enquiry to our Freedom of Information link officer, Mohsin Abbasi, who will lead on the collection of the data you request.

Yours sincerely,

Ed Gowan
Assistant Director, Commercial Services
London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP
Tel: 020 8359 4346

What Mr Mustard guesses is the case is that the heading on page 35 was wrong, it had been brought forward from the previous year's report and no-one involved in the production of the report noticed. Let's see if the officer can bear to use the word mistake, as in "I made a mistake".

The next action illustrates all that is wrong with the council.

The AD for commercial transformation should know off by heart all of the main One Barnet numbers as if not he simply isn't worth employing at that level. The answer to Mr Mustard's question is almost certainly in the top secret Appendix 1 and if that had not been classified as it has when it contains figures that every resident has a right to see Mr Mustard would not have needed to make his enquiry. Mr Gowan could simply have looked up the answer to Mr Mustard's question in 5 or 10 minutes and with a quick bit of cut and paste sent a reply. Oh no, far too easy to spend 5 minutes doing some work, instead, he delegates the task to a fairly junior staff member whose replies Mr Mustard has not found entirely satisfactory in the past.

Even more ridiculous is that what should be a simple piece of correspondence that could have been handled in 10 minutes although 10 days is allowed for correspondence has not been turned into an FOI request by the council (don't count this as one of Mr Mustard's requests) which gives them up to 20 days to answer and has to go through the FOI management software and take up the case of the 3 main FOI officers who have enough to do as it is.

Not only is the council bureaucratic, it creates bureaucracy at the drop of a simple question.

Cllr Rayner wouldn't utter the word Stupid the other evening. It isn't a problem Hugh ( you did introduce yourself to Mr Mustard as Hugh I believe, Mr Mustard does not like to be overly familiar ) as you were referring to the well known KISS principle where stupid doesn't really mean stupid.

KISS = keep it simple stupid

a management philosophy that isn't coming to Barnet Council anytime soon.

Whilst we are on the subject of simple (no Mr Mustard isn't going to talk about councillors, you are so naughty Mrs Angry) there is another outstanding request of Mr Mustard's which has not been actioned since this email of 29 July 2011

Dear Mr Mustard

Apologies for the lack of a response, not least as I am broadly supportive of your suggestion.

I have discussed this matter with the Leader of the Council and intend to bring forward proposals as to how the Council will work to meet Plain English standards.

I note there is a cost of becoming a corporate member of the Plain English campaign and the Council will therefore need to consider the most cost effective way of achieving the standard.

Kind regards

Nick Walkley
Chief Executive

£9.2m can be found for the One Barnet programme, the Plain English campaign would more than pay for itself in time and paper savings yet has not been introduced, although of course OneBarnetspeak and Plain English are mutually exclusive which may have been the real problem.