FUJ00078976 - Letter from Tony Oppenheim to Pat Kelsey re: Migration Activities at Post Offices

Evidence on official site

Ms. Pat Kelsey

Head of Procurement

Benefits Agency and Post Office Counters Ltd
Third Floor

Terminal House

52, Grosvenor Gardens

London SW1W 0AB

6" March 1997

Migration Activities at Post Offices

Requirement 498 reads: “ The Contractor shall migrate existing POCL
products and POCL systems from current platforms..... to the POCL Service
Infrastructure. The Contractor shall work closely with POCL to plan how best
to achieve effective migration. At Outlets, data transfer and associated tasks
shall be expedited as efficiently as possible with minimum staff/
subpostmaster involvement.”

Unfortunately, this begs a few key questions. Putting the extremes:

e What was migrating a product or system to the POCL Service
Infrastructure intended to mean? Providing a technical bridge from old to
new and the training required to enable subpostmasters to switch over, or
the physical keying in of data on behalf of the subpostmaster? If the latter,
why the separate and specific references to “data transfer and associated
tasks” after the “agreement to agree” clause?

e “How best to achieve effective migration” - from whose perspective? The
subpostmasters’ (we do it all?) or ours (we enable him to do it all)?

e What does “minimum staff/ subpostmaster involvement” mean (noting the
word “expedited” as opposed to “carried out”)?

Not surprisingly, we hold a position much closer to the “enable” end of the
spectrum than do the PDA.

This is a difficult area, and a considerable amount of “working closely” has
been going on over many weeks. Much good work has been done to
establish what exactly needs to be done and under what types of conditions
and constraints. The experts have got bogged down over the vexed question

Commercial In-Confidence
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of who pays. PDA assert the responsibility is all ours, hence we should pay
POCL to do any work which it is judged they might best do. We disagree.

As an outstanding “Agreement to Agree”, there is a special contractual status
to this issue which you will understand. We need to find a sensible way
forward, quickly.

As with the Education programme, this will need your involvement and

assistance. Perhaps we could add this to the Hedsor agenda for a preliminary
discussion?

Tony Oppenheim

Commercial and Finance Director

Commercial In-Confidence
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