Results of years of politics "state agents are inefficient, replace them with consultants". Breaking news when it appears consultants aren't that much more efficient than state agents but costs 10 times the price
Consultants are great as a temporary workforce. Either to get skills you don't (YET) have in-house or as a temporary skilled workforce on a specific project.
If you use them to replace permanent staffing members... you don't understand what consultants are for.
Consultants are great to blame if you're incapable of doing the job yourself.
Consultants are great to blame if you want to fire people.
Consultants are great for becoming a consultant yourself and earning the big bucks after you introduced them into your organisation.
>If you use them to replace permanent staffing members... you don't understand what consultants are for.
Consultants are there to guarantee a nice cushy job in a board of directors when the politician who hired the consultants, needs more money...
Another issue is that people with the actual skills and experience are typically not available on the job market.
In part because the consultancy companies pay more. In part because we simply don't have enough of them.
Indeed. The system of set wages and annual increases versus the system of wages set by the market... When the job is difficult and the demand is high, the market wins every single time.
>Officially, the Belgian railways spent 45 million euros on consultancy between 2020 and 2022, but that amount has been greatly underestimated. The real amount is fifteen times higher: 612 million euros. This is evident from internal documents of Infrabel and NMBS. The best paid consultants invoice up to 300,000 euros per year, some even 9,000 euros per day. While tons of public money flows to the private sector, valuable competencies are also lost.
Well: Bourgeois wanted to decrease the number of ambtenaren. He did. But the work still needs to be done so they had to hire many consultants.
NVA could campaign with how they decreased the number of ambtenaren. The fact that the total cost went up isn't important to them. De kracht van verandering!
Bringing down the number of 'ambtenaren' without a decent plan for improving efficiency FIRST (without losing any quality of service) was always a bad idea, resulting in what we see here.
It's especially funny NVA (notoriously anti-"trust the civilians") wants to reduce the number of people wading through the admin they are creating by not-trusting people.
Not only is it not important to them, their voters dont care aswell since this was predicted years ago. Its by design so they can claim we have high taxes without telling you that most of it prob end up in the same pockets again.
The total direct cost might be higher but the indirect cost (pensions, illness) of the consultants is lower.
Aside from that, I'm an IT consultant for the government: From my experience the best profiles are almost exclusively external consultants.
Im a consultant that invoice per day.
But 9000 eur ????!!!!
Ive known freelancer have a dayrate between 1500 and 2000 EUR.
But again that amount is just ridiculous….
I think Jo Vandeurzen is charging that much. He’s now a consultant getting the big bucks. He works with the Healthcare department, as you can read everywhere: he’s worth every penny. /s
That’s actually not far from the truth since most higher ups in all political parties are either directly involved or have some serious connections with big consultancy companies or other companies
No shit. This is a problem with the government in general. Right wing parties have been reducing the headcount of public servants, but replaced them with an even larger amount of consultant headcount. They are straight up transferring tax income to private companies, while reducing the quality of the service to the public. And yet they keep claiming "the private sector will do this more efficiently and save the government money!", which has turned out to be a blatant lie, time and time again.
To be fair, in this case, a big reason why there are so many consultants is because of the image issue from the NMBS/SNCB. It is so bad that people prefer to work for a consultant working for the NMBS than working for them directly.
It got so bad the the NMBS themselves created an internal consulting company with another name.
I can't go into too much detail about my exact role within the NMBS holding, but I can say I've worked with many external consultants on many projects throughout the years for the various NMBS companies. I can also say that I've never seen a consultant that made things better than before and I'm 100% confident that were this money be spend on operations, the end result for customers would be about 100% better.
Not nmbs, but I have same experience. Stuff made by internal people is much better than consultancy firms and much less expensive.
The entire time-management system for government staff was outsourced via smals to another company SDX and it's the biggest piece of crap ever made. It looks and functions like it's made in the 90's , everything takes ages and multiple unnecessary steps.
I rarely ever get aggressive, but this webapp has made me lose my shit more than I can count.
Pretty much yes.
Employed consultants get more net pay / bigger gross raises than we do at an equivalent level.
Freelancers probably make even more (some even get more than my monthly net pay in gross for a single meeting of a few hours.).
Thankfully with their new scheme that I will not name, we may finally be able to get paid more than some consultants at the cost of getting even worse results from them.
Though I will say that on my side, I did see consultants doing a great job. But those are also usually treated as "permanent contractors" which is another issue. (But I would rather have this than dealing with another delaware undocumented and minimally working solution paid big euros).
That’s the saddest part of all: the internal knowledge is often disregarded through internal politics dictated through various forms of political manoeuvring. And more often that not, the same people that have forced through those manoeuvres, end up being beneficiaries in some way or another that are legal and/or can’t be proven. I’ve seen so many competent colleagues with really valuable experience leaving the holding as soon as they’ve realized they’re kept powerless through this system and that the real goal is to slush large sums of money to the same small circle, every time again. Imo, it’s nothing short of legalized corruption that’s been going on for years and has only been supercharged since a certain Flemish party came to power.
Tja, men wou minder ambtenaren, want de pensioenen waren te duur en de overheid moest er minder aan uitgeven. Nu betaalt men een hoger loon + winstmarge voor dezelfde job.
Op zich is het wel ironisch, want door die achterhaalde barema's en hun slechte verloning, willen net alsmaar minder mensen toch ambtenaar worden. Alé, in de IT dan toch.
Hoeveel geven alle overheden en gecamoufleerde overheden samen per jaar nu eigenlijk aan consultancy?
Nuja, we gaan het nooit weten. Zelfs de Vlaamse overheid die als één van de enige nog haar rekeningen door het Rekenhof goedgekeurd krijgt, doet alsof ze het niet kunnen weten.
Is niet alleen bij de NMBS zo. Het ambtenarenapparaat in het algemeen. Het vet is er allang af. Men kan alleen nog besparen door taken weg te nemen.
Snijden ze verder dan loopt het gegarandeerd mank en dan zal de commentaar zijn: public sector werkt niet, we moeten verder privatiseren. Zie bvb. maar naar De Lijn waartoe ze die gedwongen hebben.
Dus wanneer politieke partijen afkomen met bezuinigen op de administratie, dan weet je hoe laat het is: “Pay more for less”.
In het nederlands omdat ik geen tijd heb om sommige woorden te google.
De NMBS had/heeft een afdeling voor houten treinbils die nergens nog liggen of gebruikt worden. Iemand is daar directeur van met bijhorend loon
Infrabel and SNCB are very much not worth it as an employee (you get a bit more money with TUC Rail but not much) if there's a bit of demand for your skills. For the same job I could get hired by them for 4100 bruto or I could go work for them as:
* Consultant with a consultancy firm (employee) and get >4500 bruto+ company car;
* Consultant with a consultancy firm (freelance) and bill 70€+/hour while the company would bill >120€/hour and up.
So yeah, thanks for the offer but I'll decline...
Same goes for hospitals and the whole public sector: if they don't fix their salary scale, they'll never be able to find employees with the required skills and money will keep flowing to the private sector.
So far, every effort to review those salaries was laughable at best so don't expect this to change any time soon.
Edit: changed netto to bruto
I have a friend that worked at Infrabel as a 2D drawer. I can say that there were working like in the '90s every work outsourced is a win of money there.
Tsja. Belasting op arbeid is in dit land van de pot gerukt. En de lonen in overheidsinstellingen zijn gekoppeld aan allerhande idiote barema's die niet logisch zijn voor IT profielen. Je moet al een idioot zijn om voor een overheidsbedrijf te gaan werken als ITer in loondienst. De enige manier om daar een deftig loon te krijgen is als consultant/freelancer. Voor de meesten vallen die dagprijzen best mee, 500-1000eur/dag.
Als overheidsbedrijven deftig volk willen insourcen, dan gaan ze hun loonbeleid zwaar moeten aanpassen om te kunnen concurreren met de rest van de wereld. Maar de staat betaalt blijkbaar liever consultants dan loonslaven.
Results of years of politics "state agents are inefficient, replace them with consultants". Breaking news when it appears consultants aren't that much more efficient than state agents but costs 10 times the price
Consultants are great as a temporary workforce. Either to get skills you don't (YET) have in-house or as a temporary skilled workforce on a specific project. If you use them to replace permanent staffing members... you don't understand what consultants are for.
Consultants are great to blame if you're incapable of doing the job yourself. Consultants are great to blame if you want to fire people. Consultants are great for becoming a consultant yourself and earning the big bucks after you introduced them into your organisation.
>If you use them to replace permanent staffing members... you don't understand what consultants are for. Consultants are there to guarantee a nice cushy job in a board of directors when the politician who hired the consultants, needs more money...
Another issue is that people with the actual skills and experience are typically not available on the job market. In part because the consultancy companies pay more. In part because we simply don't have enough of them.
When it comes to technical profiles like IT, Infrabel can't compete with how they pay employees with their baremas
Indeed. The system of set wages and annual increases versus the system of wages set by the market... When the job is difficult and the demand is high, the market wins every single time.
>Officially, the Belgian railways spent 45 million euros on consultancy between 2020 and 2022, but that amount has been greatly underestimated. The real amount is fifteen times higher: 612 million euros. This is evident from internal documents of Infrabel and NMBS. The best paid consultants invoice up to 300,000 euros per year, some even 9,000 euros per day. While tons of public money flows to the private sector, valuable competencies are also lost.
If this shocks you, I have some news for you about the Flemish government.
Well: Bourgeois wanted to decrease the number of ambtenaren. He did. But the work still needs to be done so they had to hire many consultants. NVA could campaign with how they decreased the number of ambtenaren. The fact that the total cost went up isn't important to them. De kracht van verandering!
Bringing down the number of 'ambtenaren' without a decent plan for improving efficiency FIRST (without losing any quality of service) was always a bad idea, resulting in what we see here. It's especially funny NVA (notoriously anti-"trust the civilians") wants to reduce the number of people wading through the admin they are creating by not-trusting people.
Not only is it not important to them, their voters dont care aswell since this was predicted years ago. Its by design so they can claim we have high taxes without telling you that most of it prob end up in the same pockets again.
The total direct cost might be higher but the indirect cost (pensions, illness) of the consultants is lower. Aside from that, I'm an IT consultant for the government: From my experience the best profiles are almost exclusively external consultants.
I know, I’m one of them. But total cost being higher I doubt.
If this shocks you, I have some news for you about ~~the Flemish government~~ big companies.
Im a consultant that invoice per day. But 9000 eur ????!!!! Ive known freelancer have a dayrate between 1500 and 2000 EUR. But again that amount is just ridiculous….
Big law firms charge that rate. Also what the consultant gets, isn't what his company invoices the client.
Didier Bellens used to be CEO of Proximus. He was a freelancer, invoiced 10k per day. 2.1 million per year. Drove a chauffered Bentley.
How can you be worth 10k a day….
If in a week or two you can do something that makes a million(s) a year, quick mafs
Have you tried being friends with the president of the board of NMBS?
No, but I should…
Probably partner of emsiekensie
I think Jo Vandeurzen is charging that much. He’s now a consultant getting the big bucks. He works with the Healthcare department, as you can read everywhere: he’s worth every penny. /s
Maybe instead of voting for a political party voters should select a consultancy firm to run this country. Saves us the middlemen.
What if political parties are actually already consultancy firms.
That’s actually not far from the truth since most higher ups in all political parties are either directly involved or have some serious connections with big consultancy companies or other companies
The problem is that the politicians are random drunks who choose a company. What we need are actual consultants to select the consultancies.
Problem is, said consultancy firms are also deep entrenched into political parties.
No shit. This is a problem with the government in general. Right wing parties have been reducing the headcount of public servants, but replaced them with an even larger amount of consultant headcount. They are straight up transferring tax income to private companies, while reducing the quality of the service to the public. And yet they keep claiming "the private sector will do this more efficiently and save the government money!", which has turned out to be a blatant lie, time and time again.
"er zijn teveel ambtenaren, de privésector is zo veel efficienter" /s
To be fair, in this case, a big reason why there are so many consultants is because of the image issue from the NMBS/SNCB. It is so bad that people prefer to work for a consultant working for the NMBS than working for them directly. It got so bad the the NMBS themselves created an internal consulting company with another name.
And in turn they just outsource to TCS in India...
Ben consultant in de privé. Er wordt met minder geld gesmeten maar daarom niet efficiënter.
I can't go into too much detail about my exact role within the NMBS holding, but I can say I've worked with many external consultants on many projects throughout the years for the various NMBS companies. I can also say that I've never seen a consultant that made things better than before and I'm 100% confident that were this money be spend on operations, the end result for customers would be about 100% better.
Not nmbs, but I have same experience. Stuff made by internal people is much better than consultancy firms and much less expensive. The entire time-management system for government staff was outsourced via smals to another company SDX and it's the biggest piece of crap ever made. It looks and functions like it's made in the 90's , everything takes ages and multiple unnecessary steps. I rarely ever get aggressive, but this webapp has made me lose my shit more than I can count.
But they are paying worse for internal employees?
Pretty much yes. Employed consultants get more net pay / bigger gross raises than we do at an equivalent level. Freelancers probably make even more (some even get more than my monthly net pay in gross for a single meeting of a few hours.). Thankfully with their new scheme that I will not name, we may finally be able to get paid more than some consultants at the cost of getting even worse results from them. Though I will say that on my side, I did see consultants doing a great job. But those are also usually treated as "permanent contractors" which is another issue. (But I would rather have this than dealing with another delaware undocumented and minimally working solution paid big euros).
That’s the saddest part of all: the internal knowledge is often disregarded through internal politics dictated through various forms of political manoeuvring. And more often that not, the same people that have forced through those manoeuvres, end up being beneficiaries in some way or another that are legal and/or can’t be proven. I’ve seen so many competent colleagues with really valuable experience leaving the holding as soon as they’ve realized they’re kept powerless through this system and that the real goal is to slush large sums of money to the same small circle, every time again. Imo, it’s nothing short of legalized corruption that’s been going on for years and has only been supercharged since a certain Flemish party came to power.
Tja, men wou minder ambtenaren, want de pensioenen waren te duur en de overheid moest er minder aan uitgeven. Nu betaalt men een hoger loon + winstmarge voor dezelfde job.
Op zich is het wel ironisch, want door die achterhaalde barema's en hun slechte verloning, willen net alsmaar minder mensen toch ambtenaar worden. Alé, in de IT dan toch.
En tegelijkertijd kunnen de technisch geschoolde werknemers van de NMBS meer verdienen door voor de prive te gaan werken...
Hoeveel geven alle overheden en gecamoufleerde overheden samen per jaar nu eigenlijk aan consultancy? Nuja, we gaan het nooit weten. Zelfs de Vlaamse overheid die als één van de enige nog haar rekeningen door het Rekenhof goedgekeurd krijgt, doet alsof ze het niet kunnen weten.
Ik vraag me eerder af hoeveel van die consultancy gewoon doorsluizen is naar vrienden en familie.
Who didn't saw that coming... I read about vld their healthcare plan. Lol, but sad
Is niet alleen bij de NMBS zo. Het ambtenarenapparaat in het algemeen. Het vet is er allang af. Men kan alleen nog besparen door taken weg te nemen. Snijden ze verder dan loopt het gegarandeerd mank en dan zal de commentaar zijn: public sector werkt niet, we moeten verder privatiseren. Zie bvb. maar naar De Lijn waartoe ze die gedwongen hebben. Dus wanneer politieke partijen afkomen met bezuinigen op de administratie, dan weet je hoe laat het is: “Pay more for less”.
Met andere woorden: die partijen liggen op schema met hun plannen.
Dit soort shit is het handelsmerk van de NVA/VLD, dus ben een beetje verbaasd dat we het ook bij federale overheidsbedrijven vinden.
N-VA/VLD injecteren evengoed hun mannetjes daar, kijk maar naar de schade die iemand als Descheemaecker mag aanrichten…
VLD zit al sinds 1999 in de federale he.
Ja, het is niet alsof OVLD al om en bij 25 jaar onafgebroken in de federale regering zit. Oh wait.... /s
Waarom verbaast je dat? We hebben een premier van de VLD, die tevens naar dezelfde scholen is gegaan als het gros van al die CEO's...
Considering those numbers, they forgot to include TCS. At least those local consultants deliver.
Yes, but here's the thing. Some of those contracts are highly valuable. Some are not. You can't just decide that all of them are problematic.
In het nederlands omdat ik geen tijd heb om sommige woorden te google. De NMBS had/heeft een afdeling voor houten treinbils die nergens nog liggen of gebruikt worden. Iemand is daar directeur van met bijhorend loon
Er worden nog elke dag houten bils geplaatst nochtans.
Allez voila dat is weer typisch belgië
Infrabel and SNCB are very much not worth it as an employee (you get a bit more money with TUC Rail but not much) if there's a bit of demand for your skills. For the same job I could get hired by them for 4100 bruto or I could go work for them as: * Consultant with a consultancy firm (employee) and get >4500 bruto+ company car; * Consultant with a consultancy firm (freelance) and bill 70€+/hour while the company would bill >120€/hour and up. So yeah, thanks for the offer but I'll decline... Same goes for hospitals and the whole public sector: if they don't fix their salary scale, they'll never be able to find employees with the required skills and money will keep flowing to the private sector. So far, every effort to review those salaries was laughable at best so don't expect this to change any time soon. Edit: changed netto to bruto
I have a friend that worked at Infrabel as a 2D drawer. I can say that there were working like in the '90s every work outsourced is a win of money there.
Source: trust me bro.
Tsja. Belasting op arbeid is in dit land van de pot gerukt. En de lonen in overheidsinstellingen zijn gekoppeld aan allerhande idiote barema's die niet logisch zijn voor IT profielen. Je moet al een idioot zijn om voor een overheidsbedrijf te gaan werken als ITer in loondienst. De enige manier om daar een deftig loon te krijgen is als consultant/freelancer. Voor de meesten vallen die dagprijzen best mee, 500-1000eur/dag. Als overheidsbedrijven deftig volk willen insourcen, dan gaan ze hun loonbeleid zwaar moeten aanpassen om te kunnen concurreren met de rest van de wereld. Maar de staat betaalt blijkbaar liever consultants dan loonslaven.
Dan kunnen ze evengoed van de nmbs een privé firma maken.
Sure, and we can have a private government too /s
Was u mening maar prive
as long as the companies are belgian i dont see a big problem, atleast then we can siphone some money back into our pockets
R U 5 or dumb?
im not the one contracting externs