It’s with somewhat mixed feelings that I have to report that I have prematurely ended my career in the Water Industry. Unlike most escapees, I only had to endure a mere 19 years of captivity but nonetheless it represents a bigger chunk of my life’s work than is comfortable to recall.
Sadly, the present economic climate coupled with the 5 year Water Industry periodic review conspired to threaten our business to such an extent that we were forced to make some very serious decisions about how we took the company forward. I therefore decided to stand down as a Director, allowing the remaining management team enough reduced overhead to prepare the business for the future.
The decision wasn’t taken lightly but was also partly fuelled by my growing frustration with the industry, in particular the procurement departments, now seemingly running our Water companies and the hopeless waste of time and effort in bidding for work where ability and track record were at best secondary considerations to Carbon, H&S, CSR and other worthless policy statements.
At some recent point in the last 19 years, someone took the decision to replace common sense with corporate buyers who’s sole purpose is to carry a clipboard with a sharpened pencil, ticking boxes to check compliance with their own warped vision of company standards. The outcome is that the winners are those companies with huge turnovers, incredible insurance indemnities, overhead generating QA and Project Management systems, and little in the way of ability, experience, innovation or ultimately ability to deliver. Meanwhile the small companies with their innovative systems, talented staff, genuine focus on delivery and customer satisfaction get marginalised. All of this because our water companies would prefer to waste hundreds of thousands of pounds designing and evaluating the credentials of those that are prepared and can afford to jump through the circus hoops of the tender process. The result is the hideously convoluted and protracted evaluation process that often costs more than the value of the job being tendered.
Once the tender bunfight is over and a poory delivered project is delivered hugely over budget, it is often the small specialists that have to pick up the pieces as we had done several times recently. Inexperienced staff seconded from other sections of the business, poor management and ultimately a worthless deliverable is what you get if you screw your suppliers down with the wonders of reverse bid e-auctions and the like. Does the fact that the procurement process has clearly failed to produce cost effective results ever influence future decisions? Seemingly not.
‘Mitchell and Webb’ would make a fine satire from it, perhaps a man going into his local newsagent to ’evaluate’ his ability to deliver his paper in the morning, demanding that his paper boys should all attend bicycle safety courses, all have a calculated statement of their carbon frontprints, and all wear safety gloves to ensure they don’t receive any nasty paper cuts. This is of course in addition to the mandatory project management system reports and KPI statements that would need to be submitted each month to evaluate paper delivery progress.
The irony is that if Mr or Mrs Procurement had simply stuck a pin in the suppliers list, they would have not only saved the company hundreds of thousands in navel contemplating but would also have stood a better chance in getting something worthwhile at the end of it. To do so would of course threaten their own raison d’etre. Better still would have been to do what NASA did when faced with the issue of providing a timepiece with which to support the Space programme in the 1960s.
They didn’t send out Pre Qualification Questionaires, demand endless empty policy statements on the environment, health and safety policy and carbon footprints. No, the brains that landed two men on the moon had a much better plan. They sent a guy out to the local jewellery store to buy as many different high end chronographs as they could find. Then they tested them to destruction. The eventual winner, Omega didn’t even know the process was going on.
The secret of procurement is to buy the best product or service available, not the one from the company that makes the biggest promises, covers the most indemnity, or has the largest turnover. Establishing frameworks based on these criteria is a surefire way to end up wondering why you spent millions and got nothing for it.
When I started in the industry you could turn up on a client’s doorstep on Monday and receive an order for a £100K contract by Friday. Sadly those days are long gone. It now takes 9-24 months to ’procure’ the same services. Meanwhile in 2009 the daily consultancy charge out rates have remained consistent with rates being charged back in the early 1990s, and they were ludicrously cheap then compared to the likes of Accountants, solicitors and Garage Technicians.
It’s not all been bad. Five of the last seven years in the industry were the most professionally rewarding I’ve had. Taking the initial embryo of us 4 Principal Engineers to a staff of 16 with £500,000 turnover was a valuable and rewarding learning experience. Nothing is really wasted.
Moving on, I shall be pursuing other business interests, initially concentrating on building PoshTime to new heights. I’ll still be keeping a close eye on what the industry is up to and maybe return one day once it has learned a few lessons from it’s mistakes.
Regards
Robin Armstrong IEng MIWO
(former) Director
HydroCo Ltd.