Thread by @swardley

X : You don't like McKinsey?
Me : Gosh, that's astute of you. I thought my venom was a well kept secret.
X : Why McKinsey?
Me : It's not. I view all those large firms as parasites. It's why (when I used to do stuff with Gov) that I wanted a blanket ban on management consultants.

X : Are you working in Gov today?
Me : No. I do a tiny bit of voluntary help.
X : Will you ever?
Me : Unlikely. The conditions would have to be right.
X : Such as?

Me : Make @liammax a Lord, put him in charge of the Cab Office and then I'll bring my brand of Rottweiler Mapping (the destroyer of undeserved value) to Gov. Oh gosh, I do have a bone to pick with so many companies who have clearly taken the Michael over the pandemic.

X : What about waste in the civil service?
Me : Of course there is some but it's usually nowhere near as bad as the private sector. I have a great fondness for the civil service, they mostly suffer from dogma imposed on them by ... management consultants ... grrr, nash, nash.

Me : There was a time when "good enough for Gov" meant the "best of the best". Alas it now seems to mean "we can sell this tat to Gov for inflated prices".
X : What happened?
Me : Dogma of "the market knows best" combined with weakening of challenge over decades.

... it's why I was so pushy (2010-2013) over the need for spend control, the need for challenge. It's the single most important function for creating sustainable change. It's also why I was fairly rabid over any weakening. Lousy name, important function.

X : Weakening of challenge?
Me : When I looked into UK Gov in 2009, what I found was we had outsourced the skills to engineer solutions to the point that we didn't even have the skills to effectively challenge the solutions being proposed by the outsourcerers ...

... this is not unique to Gov, it happens a lot in the private sector. The number of £10M+ "project specification" (that's the bill for the specification not the actual building of the project) I've seen which are not worth the paper they're written on ...

... mostly because people don't understand users, their needs, the components involved, how evolved those components are or they attempt to specify in contract that which cannot be specified (i.e. uncertain) hence guaranteeing massive change control cost overruns.

X : No, I mean weakening of spend control in Gov? The bit that gets you fairly rabid?
Me : The Manzoni era. Don't get me started. Focus forward not backwards. Grrr .... nash, nash.

X : Any suggestions?
Me : On what to do? Introduce spend control - that sort of thing?
X : Yes
Me : Use this doctrine table. Start in phase I, talk with your collective (org, team, whatever) on what the terms mean and how good you are at them. Fix and move up to the next rung.

X : Is that free?
Me : It's all creative commons. Help yourself.
X : Have you seen this - slidebooks.com
Me : Oh god. You get what you pay for? Why is my stuff free?
X : Yes
Me : Can you map?
X : A bit
Me : My purpose is in this map of mapping.