When buying womens clothes ...

With three daughters, a wife and, a mother who has Altzheimer's, I am no stranger to buying womens' clothes. That has taught me buying without without user participation is high risk and frequently a false economy. When I used to buy uniform clothing I also recognised buying womens uniforms was something which really needed a lot of, let's call it, 'stakeholder engagement'. 


So it comes as a surprise that Virgin Trains appear to have got it slightly wrong with their new womens' uniforms. The first consignment of the uniforms have now been test driven and the ladies aren't happy - too low cut and 'see through'. Virgin claim it was 'not clear' how the clothes would be received until they were worn - that's hardly a surprise. So why on earth was there not a user panel involved in the selection and a trial not carried out?  If Virgin were trying to reduce cost, they are now faced with additional costs, namely, the £20 vouchers they have offered each of the women to buy underwear which will 'avoid embarrassment'. 

Would the additional £20 voucher have tipped the balance in terms of an alternative offer? Perhaps but how will we know - transparency appears to be a delicate issue though.

For those in the public sector now preparing to buy prisoner uniforms, let's hope they can get the right user panel together. 

Numbers that lie

Last week I commented on the problems associated with a typo in a contract of employment.  In that case a decimal place positioned wrongly led to a court case over an offer of either £2m or £200k.

Then Saturday's Times introduced an new twist to the ongoing investigation into the curious death of a GCHQ mathematical whizz kid.  Ironically the contractor analysing the DNA made a mistake in that "two numbers were put in the wrong way round" on a computer.  As a result somewhere in the region of 18 months investigation into his death were misdirected.

If nothing else these two examples highlight the need quality assurance when dealing with numbers - not just the calculations but the transposition. While the numbers may not have lied they were just the wrong numbers!  Yet as I observe procurement practice I rarely come across that checking even though I have seen mistakes in 'inputting the figures' and the calculations prior to inputting.

However, for a long time I have been concerned about the professions blind acceptance of evaluation matrices.  We appear to assume numbers introduce some form of objectivity while forgetting that many of those numbers are a completely subjective allocation.