Q91 Stephen Barclay: It has not changed? Do you sit on or attend all senior level committees making decisions associated with the projects that you are Senior Responsible Owner for?
Commodore Beverstock: I would have to ask you what you mean.
Q92 Stephen Barclay: Do you report directly to the Admiral or to a civilian in between?
Vice Admiral Lambert: The Commodore is responsible to the Joint Capability Board, which I chair.
Q93 Stephen Barclay: What I am driving at is, there is a vast range of committees, and Mr Gray accepted the point when we had the exchange last year in terms of trying to have a more linear structure and greater clarity around accountability. Just to recap on what the definition of a Senior Responsible Owner is, it is the person personally responsible for the delivery of the project. I am trying to establish, where material decisions are being made on the projects for which you are Senior Responsible Owner, whenever there are committees at a senior level of the MOD discussing your projects, are you a member of them or at least present for those discussions in order, as Senior Responsible Owner, to input into those committees?
Commodore Beverstock: In terms of the committees I have, I have to look at the responsibilities the Department places on me in terms of its use of the term SRO. My accountability is in terms of programming the money-that is technical speak for the P9 lines allocated to my various projects-to ensure that what is required to be delivered at a capability level is provided by the balance of projects in P9 lines.
Q94 Stephen Barclay: Perhaps we could have a note setting out what senior level committees there currently are in the MOD, perhaps any committee with a one star or above making decisions associated with any of the four projects of which you are Senior Responsible Owner, and whether you would attend those.
Commodore Beverstock: All the projects I am in, at the project and programme level, go through the Deterrent and Underwater Platform Board, which I chair for the Underwater programme, which is anything in the submarine enterprise. The Antisubmarine Warfare Programme Board will be making capability level decisions and looking at the resourcing of individual projects; in fact, I sit as part of the planning round process in order to do that. In terms of the senior level Ministry of Defence Committees, all I do, within those particular bounds, is forward recommendations to the Joint Capability Board.
Vice Admiral Lambert: Our SROs are responsible for delivering a capability. There is no point in delivering just a platform without the trained people, the infrastructure, etc.
Q95 Stephen Barclay: No. As I understand it, there are eight key components, and the SROs are responsible for some of those and not others. That is how we had a situation, which the Committee looked at in the past, of buying helicopters the pilots were not trained to fly.
Vice Admiral Lambert: That is what the SRO's responsibility is: to ensure we do not have that situation again.
Q96 Stephen Barclay: I thought the Commodore said a moment ago that he is not responsible for all eight components.
Commodore Beverstock: For coordinating them.
Vice Admiral Lambert: He has oversight, and each one of those components wil feed into his Programme Board.
Q97 Chair: What does oversight mean?
Ursula Brennan: We could not carve up the Defence budget so that, for instance, the training of the Navy is divided out between all the people who happen to have a project for which Naval Officers require training; that is why the SRO and project delivery roles exist. Bernard Gray has been taking action to up-gun the project delivery end of the programme and we have been taking action to improve the management of the portfolio.
The role of the SRO is to ensure, looking across all that, that those things come together, not just that the submarine is being delivered on time but that there will be jetties, training, doctrine, weapons, all of that. It is his function in life to say, "I am not getting the support I need from Defence Infrastructure to build the jetties". If that is a problem, he should surface it with Admiral Lambert, who will, if necessary, bring it to the Defence Board.
Q98 Stephen Barclay: No one is disputing that. If there are materiel committees happening, it is difficult to have an oversight role if you are not privy to some of those. You accepted a recommendation, but it seems, on your own admission, have done nothing over the last year to implement that recommendation.
Ursula Brennan: I have not had the chance to respond to what we have done in relation to SROs. I think we have said before that we use the SRO role differently from the way that other Departments do. During the summer of this year, we undertook a study as part of the work on Lord Levene's transformation programme, because the group in which the SROs sit will be restructured, as the whole of the Head Office of the MOD will be. We wanted to look at whether we had got portfolio management correctly managed, organised and supported. We undertook some work and concluded that the notion of having SROs in the way that we do, where their job is to draw together all those capabilities, was correct.
Q99 Stephen Barclay: There is an inherent contradiction between having capability programmes where you look at multiple projects, and saying people can move at key milestones of individual projects, isn't there?
Bernard Gray: In my organisation, as far as the building of the equipment is concerned, we are responsible for that component. We have made significant changes, which we have not yet had the opportunity to discuss, in the course of the last year, to strengthen that, and to increase the tenure of people in that. I would be happy to outline that for you. Compared to most other Departments, the MoD has a large amount of project management activity: the Astute programme has its one star direct manager; there are two two-star officers in the submarine programme overall; there are several one-stars in relation to the Successor deterrent, and so on; they work all the time, every day, on delivering the specific set of projects between Astute and the Successor deterrent.
Commodore Beverstock's role, in the way that we work it, is to take the output and reporting from them, and ask whether they are on track to deliver their component of an overall plan. If we are out of sync with other components of that, there is a much lighter touch; he is able to alert Admiral Lambert and then the Defence Board about the fact we are behind, or the infrastructure might be, or some other thing. There are a lot of people in my organisation whose day job it is to deliver those components and then pass reporting up to Admiral Lambert and Commodore Beverstock. That is how we work it. We have done three things in my area that make a significant difference. First, I have restructured the DE&S Board so that I have four three-star officers covering the totality of the programme, where once we had one Chief Operating Officer. We now have four times as much senior time devoted to the core of that programme. Second, I have insisted that anybody taking up an appointment at anything from colonel to two-star level in that organisation serves in it for a minimum four year term: that has been agreed by the Defence Board and the Services.
Q100 Stephen Barclay: That is very welcome.
Bernard Gray: Third, we have agreed that all of those posts from full colonel through to two-star will be subject to open competition; therefore, we will get the best person for the job. We made those changes six months ago and that has significantly strengthened our project governance over the course of time. There is a further set of activities around up skilling, and so on, which we might come to later. In our part of it, we have made significant progress, which I hope will improve not only project performance, but the reporting through to Vice Admiral Lambert and Commodore Beverstock to allow them to do their oversight role, not their project management role, because they do not project manage it for us: they are the overseers.