AGGRESIVELY USELESS AGRESSO

Greeeted with great acclaim as the answer to saving money the Triborough has proven to be an abject disaster.

Excellent RBK&C staff have abandoned ship and the depleted ranks of mediocre are left running services.
Services, once regarded as excellent are now third rate and getting worse.

But what could one have expected?
Behind this mess is none other than the expenses grabbing Pooter Cockell.
Pooter's experience of business administration is nil.
He once ran a three man commodity broking company in the basement below the Association offices.
He has been known to describe it as international commodities firm....presumably after a couple of bottles of wine!
So useless and unprofitable was Abingdon Cockell that it never made a profit and the name has been hijacked by Chinese scammers!

Anyway, the Cockell legacy is very much based upon the collapsing Triborough project and is exemplified by the Agresso fiasco.


Kind readers have described here the problems....

The council's internal blurb states:

• The Managed Services System – Agresso – integrates finance and HR for the three councils in one structure. 
• The benefits of this system in terms of transparency, control and accountability will be substantial. 
• To work effectively, the system must use an accurate organisational structure.

Unfortunately, there are a large number of errors within the Agresso organisation structure. 

• These are the result of a variety of factors: bringing together three councils, integrating legacy structures that were previously separate whilst also having to deal with some post data load issues which arose. 
• It is also acknowledged that there were a number of organisational changes which hadn’t been captured at the cut-off point.

The impact of this is significant. If you have an incorrect structure, it may mean that your approvals will go to the wrong people, that you won’t have the access rights that you should have, so won’t be able to carry out certain functions or processes or that the budgets you manage don’t include your full costings.

This is a tri-borough initiative intended to “save money” and be “more efficient”. It takes all the finance and human resources data of all three councils, co-ordinates them, puts them all into a new database and IT programme – and then bingo – it will conveniently pay every creditor of each borough the correct amount and on time. It has been contracted out to BT – without any pilot to see if it would actually work. BT were 18 months delivering the programme and it finally went live in April. Since then many staff, especially in schools and nurseries, have had to be paid by cash. Council tenants’ rent accounts have gone haywire because rent payments are being credited to the wrong accounts; providers of goods and services are not being paid or are being paid the wrong amount. Some small traders are at their wits’ end and at least one is facing eviction because she cannot pay the rent on her premises. 

The councils say that all the problems “may” be resolved by the end of October – in their dreams, bless ’em. 

A more crass example of the “benefits” of tri-borough would be hard to find.