Implementing

Listening to customers

Planting the Flag is about engaging citizens and communities and enabling them to contribute to the design and delivery of the services they need. This requires effective mechanisms for listening to what customers need and want - more than just sending out questionnaires or setting up focus groups, but taking more positive action to engage with communities and to listen actively to what they have to say. This needs appropriate techniques for engagement, participation and feedback. Form our work in both rural and urban communities we have experience of effective community participation in service design and can offer:

• Workshop facilitation - community groups
• Community engagement strategies and methods
• Customer needs assessment
• Designing websites to be interactive

Creating the structures and governance for joint working

Joint working involves two or more organisations working together - for this to be effective there need to be some ground rules about the nature of the relationship, and how the organisations will work together. There are many options - from information arrangements for working together, to creating specific legal entities to deliver the joint services, and a wide range of others in between. The governance arrangements can be equally diverse. We can offer guidance and support, backed by case studies of the options available, and advise on the benefits and disadvantages of each.

• Options for joint working organisational and legal structures
• Governance models
• Risk assessment - sources of risk in each model and how best to manage them
• Shared services advice and support
• Route-map development - how to get there

Developing and managing the change programme

Change can be brought about in  a range of ways - from big bang to a directed evolution - and the choice depends on the organisations involved, the resources available, and what is right for them. Managing change is more than just managing a project or series of projects, because fundamentally it is about changing how people think, how they work, how they measure success and what they achieve. There are many areas in which we can help:

• Project and programme management
• Programme office design
• Change management methods and techniques
• Techniques for monitoring change 

Introducing or developing new ways of working

New ways of working means different things to different people. To some, it is about reviewing and streamlining processes; to others it is about looking at the outcomes and creating new ways of working that achieve the outcomes better. We work with systems-based approaches that focus on outcomes and devise systems for achieving them - often radically different from the existing processes. We can offer:

• Systems thinking - training and skills transfer
• Systems-based business transformation
• Business process improvement
• Business analysis - understanding what is already in place
• Workshop facilitation - new ways of working

Creating the ICT needed

There are some key elements of ICT needed both to enable the ICT for joint working to be provided as efficiently as possible and to enable the customer-facing services to be delivered more effectively. A carefully planned joint or integrated network infrastructure, for example, is often a key element for both, but others include rationalisation of systems and applications, alignment of ICT standards and services. As in the Council of the Future, some important elements of ICT will deliver significant savings - an effective and well-designed website (to support self-service), electronic management of all documents and records (to enable smart and mobile working, and to support self-service on the web), infrastructure to support mobile and flexible working (to enable staff to work more efficiently and productively and to deliver a better quality of service to the customer). Our range of services includes:

• Review of existing ICT services
• Infrastructure review
• Infrastructure architecture
• Applications review/opportunities for rationalisation
• Systems architecture
• Mobile and flexible working
• Electronic documents and records management
• Web and social media design and support

Managing the information

Strategically, information management needs to be closely bound with your business and ICT strategy. Neither can work effectively without the other. It is also vitally concerned with information quality, information security and business continuity – both for the organisation and for its customers and partners.

There is considerable scope for achieving savings by reducing the mountains of unnecessary, duplicate or inaccurate information and providing secure access to what remains - all the more so in the case of organisations working together and sharing information. Without effective information management strategies, the expected benefits of investment in electronic document management – customer self-service, workflow efficiencies, office estate savings, etc - are unlikely to be achieved.

How we can help:

• Information management strategy development and review
• Information architecture design
• Information audit - mapping information needs, gaps, creation, flows and usage to identify strategic priorities and eliminate information silos
• Records Management gap analysis – to ISO 15489 standard
• Security gap analysis
• Ensuring Information Governance meets legislative requirements and is based on best practice
• Using information management to improve the organisation’s green credentials by reducing the costs of paper-based and fixed-base working
• Support for implementing an Information Security Management System (ISMS)
• Identifying and supporting information champions
• Communication – to ensure staff ownership of the information management strategy
• Driving up data quality via corporate commitment, performance management and staff education

Strategic joint sourcing and commissioning

Sourcing the right resources to provide the services you need, and which save money and improve service quality is a challenge for any organisation, even more so for two or more organisations seeking to work together in collaboration. We have considerable experience of advising on, and implementing shared services, outsourcing, joint sourcing, commissioning, business case development, service rationalisation, and of combinations of these to provide the optimum strategic sourcing approach.

Increasingly the options for sourcing ICT and other services are much wider than the traditional in-source/outsource solutions, and options now exist as alternatives to application procurement and data centre operation. Many councils, too, have recognised the savings to be made from the rationalision, consolidation and aggregation of ICT provision with their partners – shared data centres, shared core services such as service desk, asset management, network provision, management and support.

The future is increasingly likely to be a mixed economy model – a mix of:

• In-house provision
• Cloud-based sourcing and application stores
• Shared services with other public sector and civil society organisations
• Using informal (or formal) pools of  specialist resource
• Outsourcing of operational services
• Strategic partnership

Socitm Consulting can help by:

• Assisting in planning your strategic sourcing options, which can include any combination of the above
• Sourcing strategy development
• Developing business cases to support these
• Risk analysis and advice on risk management
• Procurement support (our service covers all three specialisms needed - technical, procurement procedure, legal)
• Facilitating partnerships between potentially participating organisations (and acting as a matchmaker)
• Shared services support – business case development, practical advice and guidance, implementation planning, evaluation
• Sourcing of specialist ICT services – eg ICT strategy management
• Benchmarking
• Reviewing the ICT service – comparative performance, maturity, fitness for purpose
• Helping to define and develop the residual client function and related service levels and contract management. 

Re-designing customer services

Working jointly usually means that existing customer service arrangements need to be redesigned - often the benefits will come from rationalising websites, contact centres and reception points, moving away from mediated services to self-service on the Web or through automated voice systems. All of this points to the need to re-design customer services to offer the best of jointly-delivered services. We can support this through:

• Customer service audits and reviews
• Process re-design
• Channel shift strategy
• Property rationalisation strategy
• Customer satisfaction review

Web and social media

Web and social media play an important role in achieving the outcomes of Planting the Flag - in offering the means to deliver services, provide access to information, and to engage with communities and groups within them. In our thinking about how public services will operate in the future, we see the Web as being the central channel through which all customer contacts are made - whether directly by the customer in using the website or social media, or by customer-facing staff in dealing with service or information requests. Placing the Web at the centre opens up important opportunities to devolve service delivery  to other partner organisations, to organisations such as the Post Office and to provide single points of access for all public services. To support these we offer:

• Web and social media strategy
• Web reviews
• Web design and consultancy
• Information and navigation architecture

Continuing to engage with citizens and communities

Engaging with citizens and communities was an important element of the Planning stage - to understand the needs of customers and to engage them in the process of service design and delivery. But this is an on-going process, to continue to involve citizens and communities and to provide them with the opportunity to influence the services they receive. We can assist by offering:

• Workshop facilitation, customer satisfaction and feedback
• Community engagement
• Creating structures to enable citizen input