[Russ]

I've been passed this from an annonymous source....

The announcement yesterday could be read as no overtime no upgrades. In ntls defence thats not strictly true.

It seem's that the reason behind the announcement is an admin screw up by COBI.
Traditionally all service affecting upgrades are done between 01:00 and 06:00 therefore on overtime.
Recent changes to the way ntl is structured mean that the regional engineers who belong to COBI are effectively contractors to ntl who only have a budget for maintenance, with all money for new services and service upgrades coming from the other groups within ntl.

The problem would appear to be that when COBI was first formed it didn't put the procedures for recapturing those costs into place fast enough. TBH thats not just the managers fault but also partly the engineers because hours worked on projects were not correctly booked to them.

This has meant that some projects have been brought in under cost, closed, project managers given a slap on the back and the savings assigned to the next project.

When COBI eventually presented their "bill" to ntl they were told sorry, that projects closed and the monies spent on something else.
Now at the end of the year it would appear they've run out of money and rather than ntl management be sensible and bail them out they appear to been told your screw up you sort it, hence the ridiculous and draconian decisions announced yesterday.

It does mean though that upgrade work already funded should still go ahead.

As an aside to this, the failure to book work correctly also seems to be partly how managers were able to justify the last round of redundancies in the local networks teams, although the guys were working all day, everyday, a lot of that work was being under reported which meant the figures for work completed said they were had more bodies than were needed to do that work.

A bitter lesson to have to learn