Where to now?

As One door Closes Another One ... Closes.

Time for a change—though a change largely forced on us. Anyway JET5 is agile and nimble and lots of other buzzwords so here we go. Fortunately we have several areas of interest and the expertise we have developed is to some degree applicable to all of these. Someone else has taken on the daily burden of providing and supporting the largest single medical rota in the UK. Good luck. We will now turn the page and life goes on.

2020-21 has been a bruising time for JET5. We have learned a lot and are perhaps now a little more worldly-wise. Our focus will necessarily be rather different from now on but Jet5 will continue to serve our medical colleagues. Thanks for all your support and expressions of appreciation during the last 6 hectic but very satisfying years of JET5 Rota.

Where is JET5 heading now?

We return to an interest of mine from more than 10 years ago that has resurfaced and hit the mainstream over the last few years. "Artificial Intelligence". Specifically we will be creating and training artificial neural networks and embedding them in systems which do useful, possibly even astonishing, things. We have the ability (our proof-of-concept systems are all very promising), we have the domain knowledge, and now also experience creating and maintaining a large, medical, mission-critical website. We are not short of ideas—watch this space.

There are 3 projects that we will be starting with and will be developed simultaneously. We are building a comprehensive neural framework designed to be applicable to all our projects. See the AI blog post to find out more.

All Jet5's non-rota stuff, and all development stuff including prototypes of the Neural Networks, will be moved here—my personal website.

Public Procurement musings

I'm enjoying coding again. I will never ever take part in another public procurement exercise. I now find it hard to see how current Public Procurement processes could ever come up with the best result. It seems that bias is considered not only fair game, but actually feels like a routine part of the Procurement process. Our experience was a real eye-opener.

As an aside here is my brief idiot's guide to winning a Public Procurement exercise in Scotland. Note that none of the following, despite obviously riding roughshod over any concept of a level playing-field, actually breaks any Scottish Procurement law.

1. Woo one or more key people: most importantly the person who will be chairing the final scoring meetings (they will be able to call as many "re-scoring" meetings as necessary to ensure the correct final result).
2. Although you are a bidder you are allowed to supply the entire tender specifications yourself. Do this making sure that all processes and features exactly match your product and your published business case. Check out potential competitors and if they have any "killer features" take steps to ensure these are omitted from the tender document (these will be impossible to add once the process has started). Your man on the spot will ensure this step goes ok, that your wording is used throughout, and that any threatening rival's key features get buried.
3. All potential users should be invited to suggest tweaks or additions to what is a virtually complete tender document. These will be carefully edited in to the tender document by your man on the spot. This process will create a useful facade of inclusiveness.
4. Split your vendor-specific features into as many scoring opportunities as you can, it does not matter if a scoring feature seems embarrassingly trivial. Make sure that generic features—common to all vendors—are, as far as possible, grouped, each group providing only a single scoring opportunity.
5. Ensure that your vendor-specific features are categorised as "must haves" and that as many of the remaining features as possible are downgraded to "desirable" or "optional". Your man on the spot will do this for you, grateful for your specialist guidance.
6. Remind your man on the spot that any product demonstrations should demand live demonstrations of features that are specific to your product—your competitors will then be forced to spend time and effort hurriedly replicating your features even where they have perfectly good alternative ways of achieving the same results.
7. And relax. Even if the final scores are a tie, your man on the spot can at the last minute cite "perceived risk" against your rivals and declare you the winner. You can pretty much set any price you want because the contract will be yours ... 100%. Champagne all round!

n.b. Any similarity to any actual procurement is entirely coincidental.

Cheers!