Royal Mail needs consultants

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/ne ... ts-3852111

Tender for extra services to help in modernisation plans
Tom Young, Computing, 28 Feb 2008

Royal Mail is currently modernising its business

Royal Mail is tendering for up to £40m-worth of IT consultancy services as part of plans to improve the efficiency of its £1.5bn-worth of technology outsourcing contracts.

Increased investment in IT is playing a key part in helping Royal Mail adapt to a more competitive business environment, according to a spokesman.

“The business is in a period of modernisation, and part of that programme is upgrading our IT infrastructure,â€

[Jess]

Consultants to manage the consultants. Thats a new idea. UNBELIEVABLE. What on earth will they do when this next lot of consultants fails to deliver? Have the management of this company got a clue about what they are doing? Or are they just looking for scapegoats when the technology failures come along....

[rhino49]

...........the idiots are already employing over 100,000 consultants who they consistently ignore, so how about getting some people up there who know about the business they are working in instead of experts on plasterboard, failed football teams and screwing the workforce.

[k979aaa]

[quote="TrueBlueTerrier"]http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/ne ... ts-3852111

Tender for extra services to help in modernisation plans
Tom Young, Computing, 28 Feb 2008

Royal Mail is currently modernising its business

Royal Mail is tendering for up to £40m-worth of IT consultancy services as part of plans to improve the efficiency of its £1.5bn-worth of technology outsourcing contracts.

Increased investment in IT is playing a key part in helping Royal Mail adapt to a more competitive business environment, according to a spokesman.

“The business is in a period of modernisation, and part of that programme is upgrading our IT infrastructure,â€

[BELIAL]

HMM , Hiring consultants ,kickbacks follow.
Corporate hospitality,freebies ,future directorships.
1000 and one ways of quietly siphoning Public money into private fat cat pockets. Eat your heart out Cosa Nostra ,it's never been so easy

[pinstripe]

Didn't they announce job losses in RM's IT departments only last week?
And what's with "But the rise of email has eroded Royal Mail’s letters business". "Haven't the 'experts' agreed that the impact of e-mail had a minimal effect on mail, as most customers still preferred to receive paper bills. It was only the companies that wanted their customers to go paper-free to save them money?
This whole article sounds like more b*****t to me. What they actually want to do is waste another £40 million instead if investing it in the people that could make a difference to the way the company is heading. Or better still, instead of paying this £40 million to IT consultants to screw the pension scheme over, leave it alone and use the money to start filling the great hole in the pension fund, it would be a start.

[F0zziebear]

Most of the responses have picked up on the word consultant, which is inappropriate in this sense.

1. Any volume impact on RM will be felt in the big banks, utilities etc.... stop advertising. Over 5bn of the items are Mailsort 3 out of the approx. 24bn items (apoliges if slightly inaccurate). Then there is mailsort 2 & 1 on top.
2. The future of the postal business is about direct mailing campaigns and fulfillment, and not social mail (which is being replaced by electornic mail, but makes up a relatively small proportion of mail, is actually reasonably expensive to sort, as many items are not uniform etc...)
3. Direct mail is all about hitting the right people at the right time to get a response and generate revenue for that business. The more information you can get on this the better the return on your investment. At the moment the IT available to do this is reasonably limited in the UK when compared to some places in Europe and further abroad. For example, campaign managers want to know when items have hit the doormat so that they can staff their call centres accordingly. Hopefully this makes sense and starts to bring some context to what you the operations guy does and what goes on around you.
4. THe IT consultants will be needed to do the following:
a. Understand the new modernisation processes and provide and IT system to support this
b. Other non-operational systems such as finance processing, HR etc... all need overhauling, which will ultimately make then more efficient, which will probably mean job cuts in HR and Finance processing (Chesterfield and Sheffield).

The central IT redundancies do not relate to this work
The contract with CSC will mainly for existing systems and infrastructure.

I am not an expert in this area, but then everyone considers themselves capable of commenting on this so I might aswell.

I hope that brings some light onto this matter. Crozier and Leighton amongst others would not be stupid enough to squander this type of money if they didn't need to. They have brought in a new Procurement and IT director, who in my opinion (though I don't know them) will take the company and make it competitive once and if other competitors truly being to offer an alternative E2E system and products. Detuschepost went through a similar period. They complelety overhauled their operation in the 1990s. OK so their chairman has been don for fraud, but the company is now in a stronger position to compete, though their prices are much higher and are facing true alternative E2E networks, which Britain is far less likely to have.

F0zz

p.s. I talked about IT being where the battle will be several months ago, and surprise surprise I was right.
p.p.s If anyone wants to offer me huge amounts of money to read their palms or tea-leaves please pm me ;-)

[norbert]

Fozzie does make some good points , there is a push towards advertising /direct mail , you can't have RM running on the equivalent of Windows 95 and Pentium I's ,ITwise .

I agree with staff skepticism about Consultants though.

HM Revenue and Customs invested some of our money in a scheme to tidy up the working environment of" it's people " and make sure desktop equipment is in the best position for the wellbeing of it's computer operators .

The Project codenamed Lean was set up to implement the 2002 Display Screen Equipment Regulations and was "masterminded " by those efficient Consultants Unipart . The most widely reported example of this "Lean Strategy " involved sticking lines of tape on Civil Servants ' desktops , so they could see where to put monitors and personal items .

One Newcastle Civil Servant was asked if the banana on her desk was "active or inactive " before the consultants could decide where it should be placed in relation to her computer .

Nobody saw the forms or file that contained her response but I do hope she demonstrated her banana was active by shoving it up his a*** . The Cost of Project Lean was £7.4 million.

New Liebour also blew £12.4 billion on useless IT for the NHS , B-Liar who apparently can barely use a computer himself naively believed that a grandiose project could transform the NHS . As Patronizing Pat said a penny wasted is a penny stolen from the Patient .

I'm sure this sorry episode had nothing to do with political vanity , incompetence and vested interests and it was a isolated computer cock up . The money would have only paid for 26,000 doctors for ten years but that's a triviality !!.

As Fozzie says Crozier and Leighton amongst others would not be stupid enough to squander all this money if they didn't need to .

[Spedley]

But the rise of email has eroded Royal Mail’s letters business, and rival parcel couriers are also increasingly competitive.

And in October the company reported a 34.3 per cent fall in annual profits, mainly caused by pension costs rising by £193m.

So the annual loss was little to do with email or competitors then. I thought not.

[norbert]

...........the idiots are already employing over 100,000 consultants who they consistently ignore, so how about getting some people up there who know about the business they are working in instead of experts on plasterboard, failed football teams and screwing the workforce.

" A Businessman and a consultant had a meeting , the businessman asked what the consultant's rates would be for the project .
"We structure the project up front and charge £500 initially for 3 questions `" replied the consultant .
"Isn't that awfully steep ? " , asked the businessman .
"Yes, it is " the consultant replied , " and what was your third question .

I'm sure RM's Board and Senior Managers would not fall for or be a part of a bull**** culture and be taken in by Pie charts ,Venn diagrams and of course stupid mandatory Powerpoint Presentation Charts that are designed to impress. LOL

[jemima]

So the new CIO isn't quite sure what's needed on the IT front, in the "areas including networking and communications, security, e-business, supply chain systems, and web services". Why is he a CIO if he's not capable of deciding this with his IT team, and needs consultants' advice? Maybe it's another example of the desire on the part of top executives to be able to shift responsibility, so they can say "it isn't my fault this has gone wrong, I followed the best advice, therefore I'm still entitled to my bonus pay". The consultants will say "it isn't our fault, RM did not adequately communicate their modernisation requirements, we are still entitled to our payment as per the contract". The British taxpayer will get to pay two bills instead of one....

Perhaps there's a problem with recruiting IT professionals for RM? It isn't that hard to decide what you want a computer system to be able to do. If your ideal software doesn't exist yet, write it in-house, then it's yours, you can update and improve it whenever you like and none of the competition can match your capabilities. Presuming of course that RM management want to run a successful business....

[apple]

employing consultants only shows one thing, that management are not up to the job they are paid for, then i guess we all knew that eh?