Shared Services

• Becoming part of someone else’s shared service model for your service delivery needs the same detailed level of clarity over your business outcomes and objectives, along with pre-implementation due diligence, that you would have for any complex service delivery relationship.
• Once implemented, you would monitor service performance as you would with any other supplier based service.
• The difference is usually how the governance works. Many shared services are provided by related or ‘more friendly’ organisations (e.g. a local authority sharing its IT services with another local authority) that often do not have formal legal contracts together.
• In this way, it is helpful to implement governance that promotes genuine ideas sharing, but most importantly, robust collaboration which, in turn, promotes strong commercial trust between each of the shared service partners.

When starting off in Shared Services you will anticipate operating in a collaborative and innovative environment. However, there are a number of practical considerations that need to be addressed; some of the challenges that typically arise include:

• Internal resistance to change
• Not measuring costs or service levels before a move to shared services
• Not documenting processes and work streams pre-implementation
• Not appointing a full-time head of client services early in the process
• Not focusing sufficiently on the transition period
• Not having a robust project plan clarifying employee resources
• Maintaining grudges over misunderstandings early in the process
• Becoming bogged down standardising technology and processes pre-implementation
• Believing that “it’s already a centralised process: there’s nothing we should do”
• Having no, or inadequate, risk management or monitoring processes
• Omitting the “make versus buy” equation.

Having dealt with the optimisation of over 500 complex supplier/service relationships, our evidence is that whilst the list below is not exhaustive, implementing these key principles will assure you achieve a much better shared outcome:

• Articulate your service expectations so it’s clear what your organisation can achieve that it could not before once the service is implemented
• Share the vision on a collaborated basis
• Baseline your existing service levels and costs pre-shared service implementation so you can measure progress
• Clarity over your business case
• Plan to have a clear governance process across the relationship(s) with the shared service provider(s)
• Implement a suitable performance management structure
• Change management operating governance
• A clear target operating model that can be communicated to the shared service provider
• Review all of the appropriate technology considerations
• Implement outcome based SLAs
• Always pilot test services in defined areas to assess implementation practicalities
• Before you start the service delivery, structure a suitable exit and transition roadmap
• Implement knowledge transfer processes
• Structure a service and contract (or heads of terms) re-shaping process and on-going performance benchmarking to assess value for money against pre-defined baselines.