About Best Practice Group

BPG was established in January 2000. We work in close collaboration with both public and private sector organisations by supporting in-house teams to formulate and implement strategic initiatives to help improve operational efficiency of their organisations. Working in partnership with your in-house people and existing trusted partners, we share knowledge, insights and augment your existing in-house resource teams (executive and service delivery) in driving towards attainment of a shared business objective:

‘Securing better value for money from the formulation and deployment of organisational change, outsourcing and technology projects’.

Independent Advisors – working in partnership with our clients

Advice from us is unbiased and totally independent of service providers. It is based on our unique blend of extensive experience of both the public and private sector in business acumen, executive support, service delivery, knowledge of contract law and information technology. Our advisors take a proactive, hands-on approach in executing work programmes and projects. They remain totally committed to working in close partnership with you towards the achievement of your corporate objectives, whilst protecting your commercial interests.

A Proven Track Record

The reputation we have achieved for delivering high quality organisational efficiency improvements and value for money improvements is based upon a proven track record of working in close collaboration with you. With over 500 previous project successes, all of our clients are directly fully referenceable.

We Help Clients in 3 Ways

As a niche consultancy business and we do three things par excellence.

Firstly, we work with clients who are embarking on large or complex procurements for solutions, services or systems and we do this with the BPG procurement process which puts them into a VERY safe and VERY robust contractual position ready for the delivery phase. Clients going through the process with BPG will usually get to contract in about 50% faster than if they’d done it alone, and also usually save about 35% on the cost of the procurement by virtue of the fact that far less legal support is needed to get to contract. Further positive outcomes are that the ensuing contract is very easy to manage, and, having signed it the vendor immediately moves into the delivery phase due to the fact that all requirements analysis and solution/service design work is done before committing to the contract. New procurements are about 70-75% of our business these days.

As a ‘by-the-by’ our procurement process was developed in the early 2000s and we later found our own invention had popped-up as an EU approved procurement method called Competitive Dialogue. (Sadly, with no royalties for BPG!) So, it’s fully public-sector and private-sector compatible and has been deployed without failure hundreds of times now.

Secondly, we do what we call ‘Contract Recovery’ work where a client is already in a contract/project with one or several providers. Often in larger, more complex, or long-lived relationships (especially outsourcing agreements) the client and vendor go to contract, have a ‘honeymoon’ period when all seems reasonably good to start with. Sadly, in many cases, the passage of time sees certain things ‘slipping’. This can be service levels dipping, costs creeping in, arguments over what’s in or out of scope and so on – there a million ways things can begin to go off the rails.

In these circumstances, we engage with both sides and firstly re-baseline the contract – getting everyone back on the same original understanding of what the expectations and obligations were originally. Then, when everyone has ‘re-understood’ the contract we look at the failure symptoms and their causal factors. With these identified we then develop whatever additional measures and/or controls are needed to put the contract right and make it sustainable. These underpinnings are then change-controlled into the contract and things are brought back into line. Recoveries are about 20% of our business – but these often involve VERY large savings for the client.

Thirdly (and this is where BPG started around 15 years ago), we occasionally work with clients who need to exit totally failed contracts or commercial relationships. Here, the modus operandi is to get the client out of the situation with the least possible damage to business as usual operations whilst getting them the maximum out-of-court settlement possible as compensation. This is something BPG did a lot in its early days, indeed, the company was then called Contention Management Ltd and we worked on over 500 disputes. It was the legal and practical expertise gleaned from all these cases that led us to develop the BPG procurement method. This was on the basis that we saw the same symptoms and behaviours cropping-up time and time again in failed contracts and projects. We thought this through and decided there was a better, in fact bombproof, way of getting clients into contracts in the first place – hence we only do a small number of disputes/exits these days compared with 75% of our time on new procurements.