Tag archives for FiReControl
FiReControl’s Failure
The Public Accounts Committee have opined that the FiReControl project wasted £469 million pounds. A sobering report, all the more so if you were one of the people that worked on the project. How could things go so expensively wrong? I read the whole report from the PAC see if I could work out from their evidence how the failure occurred, and what I could learn from it. Largely I understand why it happened, and I can see some of the things that I was responsible for mentioned positively in the NAO & PAC reports. It just wasn't quite enough to make it work. Fortunately (for me) I wasn't involved in the procurement and so I don't believe that I was directly responsible for the problems that occurred (for example not having a decent contract with appropriate milestones), or managing the…
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Not News!
We're not in the news! Huzzah! OK, I know lots of people and things are not in the news but usually that's because nothing has happened that the media would even be aware of. We've had a busy couple of days at work (Monday afternoon and all day yesterday) because of the publication of a Select Committee report. There have been a few press notices about this embargoed until 00:01 today and we have been doing our side of the story to be ready in case of press enquiries. However not a thing on the news or the websites for BBC News or the Guardian that I've searched on, even Google News doesn't have anything on it other than ePolitix. So far so good, although no doubt it will be picked up at some point. Then the deluge of enquiries will start.
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Is Themself a word?
I am a civil servant and in the course of my work I was writing a document for publication (a Fire & Rescue Service circular). In that draft I used the word 'themself' because it was a gender neutral third person singular. I got back an e-mail from a colleague informing me that I couldn't use 'themself' because it wasn't a word. Here's an edited highlight of the e-mail (names removed to protect the guilty and innocent alike). >>> Someone 14:47 04 Jul 06 >>> There is no such word as "themself" >>> Themself 04/07/06 15:43:10 >>> I disagree on the existence of 'themself' I use it all the time. Perhaps it is a Scottish word. >>> Someone 16:07 04 Jul 06 >>> "Themself" is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Chambers Dictionary says it is best avoided. And Fowler's Modern…