Who Can Deliver Digital Transformation Programmes, Strategy and Roadmap by Utilising a Partnership Approach?
Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) is based in the South West of England with approximately 4,000 staff delivering social care, education, infrastructure and transport, highways, and healthcare services to approximately 1 million citizens. After outsourcing all ICT services for the past 20 years, GCC is on a journey to regain control of its customer experience.
GCC’s first step is to deliver a business-wide digital transformation programme, named the Work Smarter Digital Programme (WSDP), designed to transform and improve IT services for council staff, customers, and strategic partners. This programme aims to increase the value of GCC’s business processes and public interactions through digitalisation and improved management of its service assets. Cantium were engaged in supporting with the:
- Service Design and Implementation
- Technical Architecture Assurance, Strategy and Roadmap
- Programme Management
Managing the Programme of Works for WSDP
Cantium began by creating a partnership with GCC. This partnership approach enabled the two organisations to work together to achieve the programme goals, implement learnings from historical challenges, and understand the Council’s plans for the future. We began by auditing the current service provision and designing a scalable model that can include two other partner organisations in the future, Gloucester City Council and Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service.
Together, we designed a service model that could achieve GCC’s goals, bringing in-house the Council’s customer-facing ICT services. This included 1st line, 2nd line, request fulfilment, area support, project delivery, change, and incident management. Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) was used to inform the content of the new job roles and provide the basis for a development framework based on best practice, enabling GCC to become self-sufficient in training and developing a more focused and professionally orientated workforce. A Service Integration and Management (SIAM) model was considered, but the benefits of the Council’s tailored model outweigh that of a SIAM model due to the function size.
The other ICT services were grouped as a single control, which an external supplier will provide. The exit of the existing managed service, which had been in place for seven years, was successfully managed against a short time frame. The process included the transfer of service to in-house, the stand up of new functions, and transfer from one third-party provider to another. Staff were TUPE transferred to GCC during this process and from GCC to the new 3rd party provider.
Project Outcomes
The Service Design was informed by the GCC Target Operating Model and leant heavily on ITIL best-practice. This discovery exercise and service design was completed from April 2020 – June 2020. After which, a new client-side function was created, delivering IT Service Management services internally, with infrastructure and technology services being delivered externally. Remote collaboration was key in enabling us to achieve the exit, transition and stand-up of services between July 2020 and March 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We completed the mobilisation and management of the WSDP by developing the programme plan and implementing workstreams, resourcing the workstreams and implementing programme governance and reporting. Our partnership enabled regular dialogue and formal monthly checkpoint and review sessions to take place, ensuring the deliverables and outcomes met the specification. Any risks to achieving the stated requirements and results were raised and tracked via the joint governance arrangements, including a full audit and due diligence activities.
This project is only the start of the Work Smarter Digital Programme for GCC. Already recognising the advantages of having control and assurance of its customer experience, GCC is on a journey to fully realise the programme benefits, improve SLAs and increase customer satisfaction. Due to the scale of organisational change, the overriding recommendation to the Council was to transform its technology platforms and digital capabilities as a priority. Starting in April 2021, GCC will implement Windows 10, Office 365, and SharePoint online, underpinned by a technology refresh and upgrade of the WAN, LAN and WiFi networks.
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