As I was once one of those allegedly 'greedy consultants' you have mentioned above I can assure you that when the client doesn't really have a clue what it actually wants from its projects (now I wonder which client I am speaking about there) that the 'specification', as much as it is, usually means that the consultant has to build all sorts of unknowns into the estimates because, as sure as tomorrow will come, so will the flack if the estimates are too low when the project hits the buffers...
I have seen some woeful client requirements documents in my (perhaps too long) career and I do recall one project that had nearly 300 technical queries on the client and in which some cases they clearly stated they weren't going to 'bother' to respond to, just get on with it.
End of whinge.
There are a number of major problems in todays railway, the number of stakeholders non of which can have a clear vision or strategy until one of them comes up with one but 2 of the key stakeholders have short term tenure ................ the
TOC▸ typically 7 years and the Government typically 5 years. The TOC is at the behest of its contract with the
DfT» which in tern has to bow down to the elected Government, who can even change its direction of travel when the Sectary of State is changed in a reshuffle. Even
NR» works to its Control Periods of 5 years which do not line up with general elections of with TOC franchises.
The
UK▸ railways lacks a cohesive leadership, for all its failing
BR▸ had far better vision of what it need to do and where it wanted to be that the industry has today.
Nothing wrong with consultants being brought to do work but they are only cost effective when the client is an informed client NR lacks a solid engineering base (that is not only engineers but project managers), but it is driven by the Government to out source as much as it can because contracting out is cost efficient so therefore so much of it is done by short term people.
The solution is not simple but removing the politicians out of the equation would help
Click on the map to explore geographics
