http://www.stargate-consultants.ca
June 30, 2010
Mr. John R. McDougall,
President
National Research Council Canada
NRC Executive Offices
1200 Montreal Road
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R6
Dear Mr. McDougall:
The purpose of this letter is to question why, when NRC is short of funds to support R&D, you are allowing your Human Resources department to spend between $250,000. to $500,000 to "re-invent the wheel" by posting on the MERX website an RFP asking for bidders to develop and present a course entitled, "Performance Management Training" [Ref. # 198720].
As a taxpayer, and an knowledgeable person in the field of R&D personnel management training, I find this RFP an outrageous waste of taxpayers money.
In my 35+ years providing R&D personnel management training to scientists and engineers in Canadian federal and provincial government departments, and in U.S. and Chinese private companies, I have noticed that about every 8-9 years your HR department goes on a training course development kick with some fancy name, instead of working with people who already provide R&D management training to scientists and engineers. I have also noticed that scientists tend to ignore what is going on in administration until it is too late to do anything about it. They "turtle", i.e., pull their heads in, and hope the administrative crap flys over their heads.
The workshops that I have put on for NRC institutes in the past have not come about because of any intelligent planning by your HR department but from the individual initiatives of NRC D.G.s. I have also had many NRC research staff from across Canada on my workshops when the primary client was some other government department.
I would suggest that a more fiscally prudent approach would have been for your HR department to contact several potential firms who already specialize in R&D management and weave them together to develop a workshop to fit the needs of NRC. This assumes, of course, that someone in your HR department actually knows that R&D management is different from general management. Please see the R&D Management Assessment Tool that I helped develop for NRC a few years ago, under the direction of your Planning and Performance Mgmt. group.
NRC does not need an overly customized course developed as information about performance management and successfully introducing change in an R&D based organization is well known. Information about how to effectively manage R&D organizations has been well documented over the past 50 years (see S&T Bibliography on our website). In my opinion, NRC is not really a unique organization when compared to other R&D organizations, with one possible exception, its level of arrogance which in the past has cost it both money and reputation (Chandar Grover scandal).
I am enclosing a copy of one of our R&D management modules which deals with the topic of performance management in an R&D organization. This module is not to be copied or circulated, without my express permission. I am also including a listing of the R&D management modules that we have developed over the past 35+ years, along with one of my published articles. As this is not a pitch for business, I have also included an ad from one of my competitors, who recently beat me out on a management training project with NASA.
I hope that you will take the time to rethink approving the actions of your HR department and find a more fiscally responsible way to meet the R&D management training requirements of NRC.
Yours sincerely,
Thomas
E. Clarke, M.Sc., M.B.A.
President
cc. Roman Szumski
Dan Wayner
John Coleman
Louise Horton
THE CONTRACT FOR THIS RFP WAS SUBSEQUENTLY AWARDED TO ALIA CONSEIL, A QUEBEC-BASED
FIRM FOR $236,480.75