Overcoming risk aversion in the public sector to create better value for money

For public sector procurement, partnering with a business that helps their team or department to be more agile brings lasting benefits.

This is especially true for local and central government, including education and healthcare, which tend to have sprawling project teams incorporating stakeholders from multiple departments.

Here’s how a fulfilment company like Granby helps these teams deliver successful projects that get the best possible outcomes and the best value for money.

What are the challenges?

Our public sector clients regularly find themselves hampered by the sheer size and complexity of their teams, processes and projects.

Pain points created by public sector complexity increases the cost of delivering a project and pose a threat to its quality, value for money and objectives.

Key paint points include:

• Grey areas on internal responsibilities and accountability between teams
• Regulatory red tape due to over-caution or misunderstandings
• Co-ordinating multiple external partners for each project
• Slow-moving culture changes, such as the adoption of new tools and processes

How do we do it?

Being an SME, Granby is well grounded in an agile approach to project delivery. We are required, on a daily basis, to overcome blockages with creative problem solving – without missing a beat.

It’s our remit to help:

• Improve communication
• Streamline processes
• Deliver the project on time and within budget – adding value where possible
• Give insight into best practice and red flags to inform future delivery of similar projects

Addressing the pain points

1. Grey areas on internal responsibilities and accountability between teams

Operationally, public sector organisations are very complex. Colleagues from multiple departments might be involved in a single project, each with unique responsibilities, priorities and requirements.

Large teams can create grey areas around responsibility, accountability, therefore impacting timely progress, agile efficiency and cost. Projects go round in circles.

Our approach is proactive. We do everything we can to support great communication and empower public sector clients to make the informed and timely actions they need to take to get a project successfully over the line.

We’ve got a great fulfilment system on our side to help with this (more about this further down). But it’s our can-do attitude that makes a difference.

It’s a moment of pride for us when a senior resource on the client side thanks us because they haven’t had to step in to rescue a project.

2. Regulatory red tape due to over-caution or misunderstandings

Granby is a Crown Commercial Service supplier, so we come primed to be able to handle public sector warehousing and fulfilment.

The public sector has to have a robust governance strategy. However we’re sometimes confronted by excessive red tape when the project kicks off. A good example of this is data security and compliance, which is understandably a worry.

In most cases, we are able to eliminate laborious security checking from the project timeline by pushing back on over-caution: Granby is ISO 27001 certified and as this is the benchmark, there’s no need for additional security checks in triplicate.

This is an important point because these bloated processes and strategies affect timelines and costs.

Many government agencies are overwhelmed by bloated processes. Often there is a single partner strategy that is intended for application across the board, but we are able to demonstrate very clearly how and why this process can be tailored on the fly, without any risk at all.

3. Co-ordinating multiple external partners for each project

As well as all internal teams involved in a project, our clients might have to collaborate with several external partners, like Granby, to deliver a project.

As the fulfilment lead, one of our roles is to bring all key information in one place, allowing for better communication between all parties.

We’ve invested massively in our fulfilment system, SCOPe. This clever technology gives us, our clients and our partners full visibility of a project, in real time. It doesn’t matter that every party uses a different system; our API links everything up.

This functionality and visibility is crucial for public sector projects with multiple partners working on different systems of their own.

SCOPe’s thoroughness puts a stop to nasty surprises and allows us to plan and execute projects with great efficiency and effectiveness.

4. Slow-moving culture changes, such as the adoption of new tools and processes

Many public sector organisations have a preference for face-to-face meetings. They are time-consuming and therefore costly.

Lockdown 2020 to 2021 has proved how we can all make online meetings efficient and productive. However, we are already getting the feeling that the public sector is very keen to return to face-to-face meetings.

The trick to efficient Teams (or Zoom or Google Meet) calls is the same for all meetings – a sturdy agenda that includes key objectives, and ends with everyone knowing exactly what’s going on and what actions they need to take.

Collaboration is important, but sometimes all that is required is good communication and shared information.

We will certainly continue to encourage the public sector to take advantage of the efficiencies that can be made by holding a catch-up or strategy planning meeting using video calls, because we know they can be just as productive and they can save money.

Not only that – not having to travel by car or train does a bit to protect the environment too, which is something that matters to us very much.

We also challenge if we think the number of  meetings is excessive. And one way we can cut the number of meetings down is by making information available to everyone who needs to see it, via our fulfilment platform.

Takeaways

• Costs increase because of the cumbersome way the public sector operates – an agile fulfilment company like Granby helps clients overcome this.
• The benefits of working with Granby will outlast the immediate relationship because we freely share best practice, encourage agility and support clients as they improve their operations.
• The way Granby manages your project is geared towards cost savings as well as best possible outcomes.

Help yourself to our free resources on public sector fulfilment. If you’d like to know more about how we can help you deliver a great project with added value, talk to us about your requirements.

We have plenty of experience with local and central government fulfilment, from education to healthcare to data collection.

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash