Our team led a first review to identify opportunities to improve capability and performance.  This identified significant weaknesses that had developed over a number of years, including: 

 

• Significant gaps in capability, leading to an over-reliance on high cost interim workers to fill not just specialist positions but undertake routine activity that a well-functioning central commercial team should be able to deliver itself. 

• A focus on procurement activity in the narrowest sense (i.e. quotations and tendering) with huge amounts of value lost through a lack of ongoing robust contract management once a contract had been awarded. 

• Lack of organisational capability around contract management; there had been a legacy programme intended to enhance skills, processes and performance but this had experienced several ‘false starts’ and not been successfully embedded. 

• Major weaknesses in the quality and completeness of data; less than 50% of the organisation’s third party spend was represented on the contracts register, dropping to 4% for discrete blocks of spend below £100k. 

• Technology infrastructure that was not supporting high performance – with existing functionality being under-utilised and key elements of the required functionality missing. 

• Employee engagement in a critical condition – with only 7% of staff reporting that they feel valued for the work they do as part of the corporate staff survey. 

• Crucially, a lack of stakeholder understanding of what a well skilled, commercially minded service should be able to do for them – and no confidence in the existing team to deliver. 

 

Having presented these findings back to the Executive Leadership Team and Elected Members, we were able to galvanise broad organisational support to implement radical change.  We then worked with the central procurement team to develop a programme of change that would transform every aspect of the organisation’s commercial capability. 

 

The programme was made up of five workstreams: 

 

1.  Strategy and Performance – including the harmonisation of processes (thresholds, gateways and approvals) to standardise working, simplify processes and create productivity efficiencies. 

 

2.  Policy and Governance – including development of clearer and more meaningful performance measures, moving from a compliance focus to adding measurable commercial value to the organisation. 

 

3.  Systems and Processes – including the development of a new Contract Management Framework to secure ongoing value from the full commercial lifecycle and the development of a new system to support this; development of an online resource hub to improve access to information, training, tools and templates across the organisation. 

 

4.  Structure and Skills – including detailed workload analysis and resource modelling, the design of a new organisational structure to support services across both organisations, creation of new job descriptions and development of new skills (see below)  

 

5.  Culture and Engagement – working with all stakeholders to improve relationships and develop more collaborative working, moving to a more customer-focused culture to strike a better balance between ensuring compliance and enabling the organisation to act quickly and take calculated risks.