Performance Improvement

The single most important key critical element of successful delivery of externally commissioned services is being clear on ‘what good looks like’ to both you and your external service provider. However, in the many hundreds of external service delivery partnerships we…

Welcome to this, the seventh of nine articles in our in-depth series looking into the make-up, indicators and behaviours of an intelligent supplier – the practically innovative partner for your complex service delivery relationships. On reflection, I recognise that the…

Driving really strong and collaborative behaviours between you and your supplier for complex projects and services is a great achievement. Your own team’s competence in managing external providers to help accelerate the achievement of your business objectives, will be seen…

Managing Innovation – Welcome to article 5 in our series of 9 on the vitally important, but often overlooked, subject of the ‘intelligent supplier’ – what to look out for, what behaviours to support and what to avoid when it…

Any successful complex service delivery relationship requires both sides to consistently act in the best interests of the relationship – a collaboration between ‘intelligent clients’ and ‘intelligent suppliers’. However, in our experience, backed up by numerous independent reports on the…

The value for money that a service delivers is a vital message to convey on any project. Local authority councillors, on the frontline of public opinion, need to evidence this value for money from outsourced services. And, as the service…

When looking to transition from one complex project or outsourcing agreement (including the supplier) to another, one of the key issues we find is that all too often organisations try to ‘fill in the gaps’ from what was being delivered…

Many of our blogs refer to the importance of not only entering larger contracts in the right way but also the equal, if not greater, importance of managing these contracts and the providers they are with, once they are in…

In March The Times reported that outsourcing giant Capita was continuing to go through a troubling period, with significant falls in revenues and headline profits necessitating further internal organisational changes. This may not be either surprising or hugely troubling for…

“After lengthy, fully contested proceedings, the Tribunal concluded that the audit work fell significantly short of the standards expected of an audit firm and its partners.” These are reportedly the words of the Financial Reporting Council’s Executive Counsel Elizabeth Barrett…

Projects rarely run strictly according to plan. The longer your strategic relationships must last, and the higher the number of individuals, teams and departments involved, the greater the opportunity for things to veer off course. It’s at this stage that…

To promote better productivity through more collaborative problem-solving it would be useful to shift perspectives, so that when things go wrong people recognise that it’s not always the other person’s fault. Often issues are multifaceted, and the longer that they…

The collapse of Carillion had a very wide-reaching impact – there were the: (a) 30,000 or so businesses that were reportedly owed upwards of a billion pounds, (b) the political nightmare it has caused the Conservative party, and now, according to Reuters,…

There are many reasons as to why one would want to renegotiate a contract with their strategic partner but the thought of the uphill challenge puts many off. In this blog, we offer up tips for a positive resolution with…

Wouldn’t it be nice if client-vendor relationships always followed a clearly defined path with all parties focused on doing their best to live up to the business outcomes they agreed to at the outset? I can almost hear you nodding…

Outsourcing any aspect of your operations is rarely a walk in the park. For anyone who’s ever been through such a project, the challenges, misunderstandings and potential for clashes when handing responsibility to a third party are likely to have…

Problems can arise at any point within a major strategic partner service delivery relationship. Life with a strategic partner is very much like a marriage – after the first year or so, when the honeymoon period has become but a happy…

There are two schools of thought on the best way to be recognised for your efforts in the workplace. Some are brought up to believe that hard work is all that’s needed – nose to the grindstone 12 to 16…

When things go wrong in outsourced relationships, the parties will often scratch their heads, blame the other side and then look to escalate or resolve the situation that has brought them to this point. Escalation could mean anything from resorting…

Npower has faced many challenges over the last few years. At the centre of the most recent of these is the reportedly long-running billing issues the company and its customers have suffered from since IBM installed a new SAP billing…

Leading government efficiency-focused think tank IfG (Institute for Government) and US project management association PMI (Project Management Institute) recently released a new report concerning PFI value, titled ‘How to get better private finance deals for infrastructure’. The report took an…

If you are looking to renegotiate your outsourcing relationship, you are not alone: Outsourcing contract renegotiations are on the rise. Around 75% of all existing outsourcing relationships are renegotiated at some point during their lifetime according to Gartner Research.  And…

Early Contract Lifecycle Issues is the sixth article in our series of seven covering the key principles highlighted by the National Audit Office (NAO) in its report on emerging best practice in commercial and contract management. 140 projects were reviewed…

The Conservative government has, for the best part of a decade, been fixated on the debt the country has got itself into. In his Spring Budget, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that national debt stood at a figure of nearly £1.7…

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.…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…