A recurring theme of this blog is how NCC likes to help out old friends. After all, if a consultant gives you the answer you told them to before it makes sense to get them to do it again right? What's not to like about that?
And so it appears to be going with old pals Invigor8 (I still can't get the X-Factor boy band contestant image out of my head). Having helped smooth things over the on the 'culture' issue I wrote about how they were now coining it in with training contracts which were exempted from the usual tendering requirements.
And you know what? They've only gone and bloody done it again haven't they?
Last time it was only worth £15k, however, in this latest round they will trouser £95k.
Now why would there be a decision to award a £15k training contract only for there to be another one less than 2 months later for the same thing but this time for £95k? There's a spectacular project management fail if your initial estimate of cost goes from £15k to £110k in seven weeks. Surely when you're planning a training project of this size you'd have a pretty good idea of how much the total cost would be at the outset?
Smells like a little bit of rat to me, I shall be keeping an eye on any more non-tendered contracts for Invigor8 from now on. If anybody has any inside info please let me know via the email link, discretion assured.
An article on public sector improvements on the Invigor8 website is entitled: "Striving relentlesslessy towards the mean... should public sector organisations be aiming higher?".
ReplyDeleteI take their use of the word 'mean' to be what most of us would call 'average' but maybe NCC have interpreted it as an indication that Invigor8 can help sharpen the council's cutting edge even more.