****STOP PRESS****STOP PRESS****STOP PRESS****

EDS NOT involved in the Heathrow Terminal 5 opening day disaster.

Is the tail wagging the dog?

In yet another Ask The Boss, dated 11/3/08 and in answer to a question challenging the appropriateness of giving effective equal employee status to EDS staff with regards the staff survey, the Boss responds by saying that “a set of Partnering Principles endorsed by the Agency Owner and the then Vice Chief of the Defence Staff (VCDS) were established early in the relationship to set the foundations for sharing knowledge and experience to ensure that MOD and EDS employees worked together to meet the customers needs.”
This statement reveals two significant things that the Boss seems to overlook… Firstly, “EDS employees” are EDS EMPLOYEES and are wholly distinct from MoD staff regardless of “working together to meet customers needs.” Secondly, SPVA is a customer of EDS… THEY are contracted to provide US with services. If the Boss wanted to know how that is working he should be conducting a customer satisfaction survey of all MoD staff, both service and civilian, to ask their genuine views on the quality of the service that EDS provides. That might get a statistically significant response rate, which is more than can be claimed for the current survey. By the way, if it is deemed appropriate to spend public funds to conduct a staff survey of privately employed staff in EDS, why stop there? Should we not also survey our other suppliers? Why not include Trillium, Eurest, Group 4, Dalkia, Parcelforce and Rentokill staff, all of whom are non-MoD employees exactly like EDS staff. Why not ask how satisfied they are supplying services under contract to SPVA. Should we also survey DWP staff who continue to provide services to SPVA? And if not them, then why EDS? They are not, after all, our employees!

Credit where credit it is due

The management of the Veterans’ Badges and associated areas came to see us during the week.

They are expecting a reduction in staffing needs in their area. This is not due to some broad brush attack but due to natural business raisins. They will consult but that isn’t the point…

The point is that they wanted to check if we were happy for staff, on a purely voluntary basis, to be able to go into the redeployment pool whilst the standard talks take place. Why? So that the staff do not miss out on any opportunities. We have agreed this approach.

Commitment to consultation and caring for staff… credit, as the heading suggests, where credit is due.

THE LAST WORD…on EDS and tales

Note that the views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily correspond to the views or official position of the Branch or the National Union.

In my last article I made a comment about the management team photograph in @SPVA. The latest @SPVA does a double spread on EDS – thirteen of them. Doing four and a half jobs, if that, from what I can make out, but then I’m out of touch with all the acronyms, abbreviations and management speak. How do they all fill the time? I must be missing something – they all seem to be managing abstract concepts. I’m surprised Wittgenstein isn’t on the board. I just hope all thirteen don’t sit round a meeting table all at once; the last time that happened, the boss got crucified. Actually, I don’t think all thirteen could sit down together because that would exceed the critical mass of gobbledegook and they would all spontaneously combust.

On the subject of the last article, if any of you are wondering about the painting, it’s just my fantasy take on Captain Oates heroic (or stupid, depending on your viewpoint) exit from the Scott polar expedition. For those of you who wonder about such things, it was done in watercolour using phthalo blue and lamp black with heavy use of dry brush work, with a touch of white gouache. I don’t usually paint stuff as spooky as that, so to reassure you that I’m not a troubled genius about to slice off my ear I’ve stuck a more rural snow scene at the top of this article. I did think about doing a painting of Tomlinson House with a flock of seagulls dropping a mountain of poop on it, but I couldn’t be arsed with all the windows. In any event, as a metaphor it lacked a certain finesse, unlike the Oates painting. Look good in the boardroom, though, especially at Ministerial visits. But perhaps that’s a metaphor too far. To get images for painting I can now be found trailing round the Ribble Valley and the Trough of Bowland with a camera. Only an inveterate optimist would dream of painting watercolours outside in soggy Lancashire; in any event, I’ve always thought sitting down at an easel outside is holding a hostage to fortune. Anyway, all this activity inevitably means having to eat lunch in the various gastro pubs scattered round the area, but hey, an artist has to suffer for his work to have any soul. I do all this during the week, weekends obviously being for people who work.

Moving on to the VA PCS blog, where this appears, has anybody else noticed in the Quotes and Snippets section, that none of the authors of the blog has listened to any music since 1985? Quite an achievement, that. It’s a bit like Ashes to Ashes, except in the PCS office there are more retro haircuts. (I love this lack of censorship – everybody gets it.) Still, who am I to criticise, sitting here drinking green tea and listening to The Piper the Gates of Dawn. (Quiz question: From which book did Pink Floyd steal that title of a chapter?) This album contains one of the best love songs ever written - ‘Bike’. Dig it out if you don’t believe me. So much acid was dropped during the making of this record I’m surprised the CDs don’t dissolve.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve re-read the EDS stuff and I think I’ve worked out that ‘transition’ means ‘firing.’ ‘Reducing headcount’ is obvious, but I’ve never before seen it used with a sense of pride rather than regret. I wouldn’t like to be working at Innsworth when the proposals ‘mature’. Actually, I wouldn’t like to be working anywhere. At least anywhere EDS touched with their verbal obfuscation.

And management wonder why morale is low. It’s not rocket science, folks.

MoD financial arrangements with EDS still lacking any transparency

We spotted this excellent question in ‘Ask the Boss’ and decided that it deserved a wider audience. To be honest we could have posted it without any further comment as we really couldn’t have made it look any worse if we’d tried.

Question

Is the way that the Agency decides to waive or enforce the Service Level Failure Charge on EDS the same as other Government bodies/organisations that have similar partnership arrangements with private sector companies?

Answer

Thank you for your question.
Due to contractual confidentiality I am not able to provide you with details of the specific arrangements but can assure you that all aspects of the SPVA agreement with EDS were subject to MOD’s normal approvals process and SPVA’s application of the terms of the agreement are scrutinised on a regular basis by the appropriate bodies.

Conveniently whilst I was writing this piece one of our readers pointed me towards this article on ‘The Register’ in 2006

EDS keeps MOD schtum over settlement

Corporate America clouds British transparency

By Mark Ballard
Published Monday 21st August 2006 13:20 GMT

The details of a financial settlement given to EDS by the Ministry of Defence have been withheld from British taxpayers because corporate America likes to keep its cards close to its chest.
EDS said in March it was seeking "adjustments" to compensate for the "financial impact" of changes made by the Ministry of Defence to its requirements for its £2.3bn Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) project.
Neither EDS nor the MOD would provide details after they reached an agreement over the contract change in May. But EDS said its second quarter results, released this month, would.
However, when the results were published on 1 August, they failed to mention how much the MOD had paid EDS.

Continued here;

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/21/eds_mod_secrecy/

Clearly there was a serious issue of transparency in 2006, and, going by the ‘Ask the Boss’ question is still a problem now.

What is obvious to all is that the government continues to award large projects to EDS despite a number of high profile failures. And whilst it does so it refuses to be entirely open about how much it (or in truth we, the taxpayer) is paying EDS. It seems to be a rather disproportionate relationship where an American corporation can dictate to the British Government about what it can or cannot say to its own electorate about how it spends that electorate’s money.

Closer to home various sections of senior SPVA management seem intent on handing over parts of the agency to EDS, presumably for efficiency reasons. But given the EDS requirement for secrecy it’s impossible to judge whether they could do the job any cheaper than us. What is certain is that SPVA management are content to give EDS a veto that keeps staff representatives out of Agency Management Group meetings, as well as, it has to be said, any former Veterans Agency managers! Furthermore, management have disbanded a very efficient and respected in-house staff survey team and outsourced the Employee Survey, without proper consultation with the TUS it should be noted; and the reason for this? Because EDS would not like it’s staff being questioned by civil servants! We wonder what they have to hide.

At this point it’s probably worth pointing out that the EDS developed MoD DII was due to deliver savings of £170m in its first three years. This sounds like excellent sense but given that the DII project is at least £2000m overspent those savings would seem to have been swallowed up somewhat.

Oh we are soooo…. Big…

An amusing Ask the Boss question about TU facility. A cynic might assume that it was planted by a management side miffed off that we are being so effective. Other cynics might wonder why the question was inaccurate and those inaccuracies have not been answered. Further cynics may deem that to not approach the TU about this before answering it was anti-Union in itself.

I will not pander to anti-Union propaganda for too long, however…

The number of reps is misquoted, indeed the facility time used is little over 2 staff years.
The grades of reps is irrelevant and perhaps, if it is an issue, we should have parity with Management Side - promotion please.
The question ignores reps on part time hours.
There is more work going through this office than ever before.
We have less reps than there are business partners and yet have to deal with a wider range of issues to the same level of depth.
We represent, as agreed, all staff (not just members) for all consultative issues.