When UKCloud, the public sector hosting firm, went into liquidation, the government’s assurances that there would be little to no disruption as a result may have been premature. Reports in the media coming from some of UKCloud’s remaining customers suggest…

The NAO released a report a while ago on the state of best practice in the public sector titled ‘Commercial and contract management: insights and emerging best practice’. It offers good insights into the way commercial strategy and capability can…

What a contract is and what it does is something that is likely to be understood by the individuals who subscribe to our thought leadership articles. But a void contract is not always obvious. A contract is defined as ‘a…

The ramifications of a breach of contract in a strategic and/or complex project/service delivery relationship can be significant to your organisation, your supplier’s business, and for everyone who is relying on the completion of the project you’re working on or…

Outsourced relationships can often be punctuated with opportunities for controversy. Having dealt with improving the performance of over 500 outsourcing relationships, evidence continues to teach us that more than 50% of these high-value contracts fail to achieve their expected outcomes…

Agile projects require a very different approach, necessitating much closer working relationships between clients and their suppliers. One of the key purposes is to keep very frequent lines of communication permanently open. This coincides with a much more detailed initial…

Have your outsourcing relationships always followed a textbook flow from selection to outsourcing relationship management and finally to successful conclusion? Perhaps not; life just isn’t that simple. Critical strategic supplier and partner relationships are difficult, complicated and ever-changing, and as…

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…

Effective contract and supplier management involves a number of facets. At its core, though, are two fundamental points: Define and maintain a clear purpose with your strategic contractor/supplier, so that roles and responsibilities between you remain aligned to the business…

When the National Audit Office (NAO) conducted a departmental overview of the Home Office, issues were raised about the way it managed its £3 billion a year spend on goods and services. These issues were about how challenges on these…

In this final article on the recent National Audit Office (NAO) report surveying the public sector’s readiness for responsibility over hundreds of PFI contracts as they come to an end, we look at the recommendations that were put forward to…

Last month we wrote about G4S’s resistance to GardaWorld’s £3bn hostile takeover bid, saying that the board had “… unanimously rejected this offer as it continues to significantly undervalue the company”. However, The Times now informs us that rival US…

This month the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released a critical report on two decades of NHS failure to get its IT projects right. This is summed up at the opener of the report “The Department [Department of Health and Social…

The coronavirus crisis has impacted clients and strategic suppliers across the globe with supply chains suffering, in often unpredictable ways, from the domino effect of challenges from any one or more organisations rippling out to affect others. In response this…

Approximately 10 years ago, the Home Office gave the green light to a programme of modernisation within the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. This programme was initiated a couple of years later. Eight years…

Given the length and scope of PFI contracts, change is inevitable, so the effective administration of PFI change management, in terms of both the change process and its associated costs, is fundamental to successful PFI contract management. In this article…

I was quite excited about the ‘street talk’ regarding the about-to-be-released IACCM Contracting Principles framework. The level of expertise on the IACCM Steering Committee and Advisory Board appears unparalleled. So, I thought, at last, an industry body has taken the…

Your strategic supplier in whatever project you have decided to look for assistance on, is a linchpin to its success, to the value optimisation that is achieved throughout the process, and to the outcomes that are actually achieved. Choose your…

The vast majority of outsourced relationships and complex projects are lengthy entities, often lasting five, ten, twenty years or more. It is likely that what may have suited your strategic partnership in the beginning will have moved on with what’s…

According to the Financial Times (FT), on Wednesday 3 July Serco announced “it had reached a deal with the Serious Fraud Office in which it was hit with a £19.2m fine plus costs for three offences of fraud and two…

Multi-sourcing offers a huge opportunity to both the public and private sectors in terms of achieving (and even surpassing) desired outcomes. The reasoning behind this is rather simple – it is, in principle, a far more streamlined and efficient version of outsourcing.…

Is this the end for PFI (private finance initiatives)? Brought in by John Major in 1992, extensively utilised by the Blair government and every occupant of No. 10 since, no matter their political stripes, PFIs have, in recent years, become…

IT enabled business change projects necessitate some of the most complex relationship arrangements of any outsourcing project. Often this is because of the tendency for such business critical IT projects to stretch boundaries, to look to create better, faster and…

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…

Outsourcing challenges, what can we learn from the recent NAO report into the seven-year contract NHS England entered into with Capita in 2015 and worth a reported £330m? The contract was to deliver the transformation of primary care support services for…

Many pressures beset those responsible for large-scale projects, forcing them to choose between a fastidious approach to procurement and project management, and meeting the time restrictions or budgetary constraints they are often required to work under. These are the circumstances…

In some circumstances, the reality of strategic relationships can be far removed from the academic ideology of partnership perfection. There are many agenda, personality, and behavioural-led reasons why such relationships don’t always achieve everyone’s expectations. When we look for the…

In a recent article titled ‘NEW National Audit Office guidance for supplier operating standards that could change everything’, we took a look at the most recent update of the Government Commercial Function’s (GCF) eight ‘Commercial Operating Standards’ and discussed their…

The National Audit Office (NAO) recently published an insightful report on the state of commercial and contract management best practice in the public sector. We have developed a number of articles on the subject matter contained within this report –…

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…

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…

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.…

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)…

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…

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,…