On Feb 25, 10:14*pm, Roland Perry wrote:
In message
, at
13:35:32 on Wed, 25 Feb 2009, remarked:





WCML electrification, Christmas 2007. "oops, we have half as
many electrical engineers turned up as we thought we'd ordered"

Give that man a peanut!
Thanks for that - it's annoying when I forget disasters!

But that wasn't a project cockup, it was only a single incident in
part of a much bigger project. I'm not sure how much you can blame the
project managers for staff not turning up when they should have.

Because it was alleged that the "not turning up" was because the
engineers had been double booked, not just because they all decided to
take the same couple of weeks off sick.

Yes, but any double booking would have been by the agencies supplying
the staff, not by the project managers. Sure more checks (that the
agencies arn't lying) can always been made, but then you get into DfT
style micromanagement.

Are you sure that it's an agency that's culpable? What sort of agency
does that if faced with penalty payments for non-performance, and why
would they think they'll ever get work again after a stunt like that?


I'd be very surprised if the project management company had all the
individual details of the staff that would be needed, that's what the
agencies are for. Of course blame will lie with the workers who are
down to work in two places at once (if that is the case) and who have
got the jobs from different agencies. But I don't see how any project
management company can take ALL the blame. My original point is that
the problem with the workers was one occasion of a much bigger
project, if there is something fundamentally wrong with staffing
supply, then why didn't happen much more often?