Helpful tips to make your strategic supplier relationships work really well

A parliamentary enquiry into how the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) achieves value for money was recently undertaken, after which its Chief Executive, Malcolm Harrison, candidly suggested that due to a lack of appropriate focus initial expectations of the CCS had…

Rupert Soames, the CEO of Serco (and grandson of Winston Churchill), recently gave evidence to PACAC (the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee). This was part of an enquiry into the work of the civil service as a result of…

The National Audit Office (NAO) recently created an insightful report into contract management best practice, combining wisdom gathered from discussions with those who operate these relationships at the coalface. It features analysis from 26 recent reports on projects that ranged…

Tens of millions of pounds were spent by the NHS on a new system to centralise GP data, known as the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES). However, a furore followed the project’s conclusion because the service was found to have…

In November the National Audit Office (NAO) released a new report on contract management, and because we found it so insightful we’ve decided to dedicate a few articles to the subject and to the findings of the report. This particular…

Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chair Meg Hillier described the UK Trade and Investments (UKTI) contract with PA Consulting as a “fiasco beyond belief” after UKTI auditors reported that poorly documented contract alterations had made it impossible for the organisation to…

The 1st December marked the end of almost a decade of partnership between Somerset County Council and IBM. This much discussed and questioned relationship which formed the collaborative entity Southwest One is now over, but the questions keep coming in…

Radiotherapy is crucial to the treatment of up to 40% of all cancer patients. However, it’s recently been reported that deaths may well have resulted from radiotherapy equipment upgrade delays experienced across the NHS. It seems that radiotherapy assets –…

If your outsourcer’s shares had taken quite a beating, with the company’s value dropping by a quarter or more over a matter of days, you might be encouraged to start asking questions of those in the know as to whether…

It has never been more important to ensure that your complex service delivery (outsourcing) relationships succeed. But how can this be achieved in an environment where it seems so commonplace that external service providers fail to achieve expected business outcomes.…

Service delivery innovation is the ‘holy grail’ solution sought by many in the UK across both the private and public sectors since we entered the austerity era. We have all been asked to do more with less. But is innovation…

When setting up any transformational programme or partnership, one preliminary aspect that can’t be overstated is the need for stakeholder communication and collaboration. Unfortunately, there seem to be many in the NHS procurement community who believe that the Department of…

Traditional Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) looks to reduce costs for a client by migrating their more repetitive tasks to resources located in more cost-effective regions of the world. We are talking about outsourcing to the likes of India (where around…

The collapse of UnitingCare – the multi-million pound collaboration between an NHS consortium and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough CCG to provide ‘older people’s and adult community services’ in the region – has had an unprecedented impact on the sector. It has…

With the recent announcement from the BBC that the NHS’s major complex projects management and procurement support force – the Strategic Project Team (SPT) – will be “closed down”, questions are now being asked and lessons must be learned in…

The NAO have reported that “A third of major government projects due to deliver in the next five years are rated as in doubt or unachievable unless action is taken to improve delivery” NAO Controller and Auditor Amyas Morse believes…

A PFI project being hailed as a model partnership, expected to deliver what it was planned to, and all for less than expected may not be something you often see reported in the media, but the Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT)…

In 2013, Police Scotland took the brave position to not ‘make do’ with an off-the-shelf system, but to build their own that would support “new standardised national policing processes and daily policing operations and investigations”. The i6 project was conceived…

Even before the age of austerity, the public sector has often had to find ways to do more with less. And now, this remit is more crucial than ever. In an era when public funding has been cut sharply, many…

‘PFI deals will cost taxpayers £209bn over next 35 years’, ‘One in five PFI assets will remain in private, rather than public ownership even after the contracts have ended’, ‘Every adult in Britain faces a debt of £4,119 to pay…

Service integration and management (SIAM) has continued to be something of a buzz-acronym in managed service and outsourcing circles. The way it’s talked about, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a silver bullet which in one fell swoop…

In our last article ‘4 Lessons from successful IT megaprojects’,we reviewed a number of the country’s largest and most renowned recent IT megaproject success stories in the context of what each could teach us from their struggles and accomplishments. This…

Megaprojects are large-scale public ventures, complex in nature, often taking many years to complete with the potential to impact on the lives of millions of people – they are projects on a scale that demands a very different management skillset,…

In their ongoing drive to reduce costs while attempting to improve services, the government has long believed shared services to be the answer. Annual savings in the region of 20% are commonly cited by those using shared services centres to…

In recent years we have recognised that there has been a marked shift in the way UK supplier managers have been interacting with their provider partners. Where in the past those looking to outsource may have been more focused on…

You will know from experience, as we do, that size and term can impact on the complexity of a project and the relationships that govern such a venture. And, as PFI agreements by their very nature tend to be sizeable…

If you were offered an opportunity to save your council tens of millions of pounds you might be tempted. The question is, what time and resources would you invest into scrutinising the shared services deal? How much due diligence would…

October 2016 is set to be the start of a new shared-services agreement between the local authorities of Haringey, Islington and Camden, a partnership that has broadly promised to save them a total of £6m a year. And while the…

Despite sticking to the letter of their contract, we see £500m of Atos contracts under review by Whitehall. Time and again you will hear us discussing the benefits of a well-worded contract, of the need for it to be clear,…

In the face of growing perceived threats to security and defence the e-Borders project was conceived to “create a joined-up modernised intelligence-led border control and security framework” tracking passengers as they travelled to our shores by air, rail or sea,…

Currently doing the rounds are rumours that 2016 could see a significant drop in demand for outsourcing services in the UK. Instinctively, when you see headlines like this, it’s reasonable to apply a degree of scepticism to such talk, but…

A mutual decision has been taken between The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CPCCG) and UnitingCare to end their five-year, £800m health services contract, after just eight months. It’s the latest in a long line of major outsourcing relationships…

2015 was a tumultuous year for the outsourcing industry. Somerset Council finally decided to end the remaining elements of their ten-year contract with strategic partner Southwest One, two years early. Cornwall Council won their case against BT to terminate their…

Photo credit: Dick Thomas Johnson Ever since the first accounts emerged of the situation Southwest One found itself in, we’ve been keen to understand precisely how such a promising, value-adding venture could encounter the magnitude of challenges that it’s faced…

With the New Year comes new challenges for Cornwall Council as it starts to regroup after its dispute with BT, over their 10-year £300m outsourcing contract, came to a dramatic end before Christmas. But what led these two parties, so…

In December of 2014, we waxed lyrical about the importance of an ICF Team. We even went as far as to say that it’s the number one lesson that organisations would do well to learn in 2015. Truthfully, we haven’t…

When faced with the task of sourcing a new provider for an important and complex project, there are many points that need to be seriously considered. However, in our experience, there is one key area in particular that is consistently…

Sometimes, despite your best efforts and those of your vendor, IT project failure cannot be averted. Inevitable though this may be in some cases, often a project can be saved or steered away from failing to meet your expectations by…

Inspiration for this piece came from an article I happened across recently. It was a passionate plea from openDemocracy UK, published just prior to Jeremy Corbyn’s elevation to party leader, which extols the virtues of nationalisation over privatisation. While clearly…

Far too many outsourced relationships fail to achieve the expectations of at least one of the parties involved in the process. And, no doubt, this was a driver behind the creation of the first International Standard for outsourcing – ISO…