blue limes supports Building Schools for the Future programme
Building Schools for the Future (BSF) is the largest single capital investment programme in schools in England in 50 years. It is aimed at rebuilding and renewing all of England’s 3,500 state secondary schools where there is need, in order to ensure world class learning environments which will support current and future generations of young people to achieve their full potential. BSF is not, however, just a school buildings programme. Rather, it is intended to have a wider educational transformation effect. In particular, it is hoped that it will engage and inspire teachers, young people and their local communities through the coupling of new or refurbished school buildings with new technologies.
blue limes have been actively involved, with 4ps, undertaking a significant number of Gateway Reviews to provide a valuable additional perspective on the issues facing the internal team, and an external challenge to the robustness of plans and processes.
blue limes launches DRIVE to boost your success in delivering benefits from investment in projects
Of course most managers use a methodology of sorts, whether it be written on post-it notes stuck to their screen, documented in a stack of procedures on their desk, or included in software that they have bought. Regardless of the type of methodology used, there is one common theme - that it typically helps them to manage projects and therefore improve their project success.
A methodology is a set of methods, processes and practices that are repeatedly carried out to deliver projects and achieve the benefits. The key concept is that you repeat the same steps for every project you undertake, and by doing that, you will gain efficiencies in your approach. Standards - like PRINCE2 or ITIL - give you industry guidance, whereas methodologies give you practical processes for managing projects from inception and right through their entire operational life. Standards are not methodologies, and vice versa.
DRIVE - Delivering Results from Investments - gives you:
While a methodology is not a silver bullet for projects, it should help you by giving you a clear process for managing your investments in projects or live services. Your methodology will tell your team what has to be completed to deliver and operate your project or live service, how it should be done, in which order and by when. Find out more about DRIVE>>>
blue limes deliver a new health gateway
Management support company blue limes has been advising the NHS on the launch and ongoing management of NHS Direct Interactive – a new digital TV service aimed at the promotion of better health. The service has been broadcast across digital TV networks throughout England since December 2005.
Involving an investment of £15 million over the next three years, NHS Direct Interactive includes five main services: advice about healthy living, an NHS services directory, an encyclopedia of conditions, tests, treatments and services, health news and features and self-care advice. The TV service will complement other NHS services which can be accessed via telephone and the internet.
blue limes provided the management support to the Department of Health and NHS Direct, with a small, highly experienced team of programme management and procurement specialists. blue lime’s role ranged from establishing the direction and strategy development for the overall service, through the design and management of the procurement process, to the creation of the service management organisation with transitional support to effect skills transfer to NHS Direct personnel.
Peter Dick, the project sponsor at the Department of Health said:
“blue limes have provided outstanding and invaluable support to the Department’s Programme to introduce NHS Direct on DTV, particularly in the areas of project and service management, procurement and contract advice, and consultancy on a range of critical commercial issues”
Faster Procurement - 10 tips - a guide from the front-line
Whenever you seek advice on procuring strategic services in the public sector, colleagues are usually pleased to share with you their anecdotes of procurements good and bad. Tell them that the reason you are asking is because you have just started a new assignment and that ‘time is of the essence’ and the advice offered quickly seems to boil down to one of two approaches; Cautious and Cavalier. The Cautious, after the sharp intake of breath and ‘can’t be done’ noises, quickly start giving advice on how to mitigate the risk to your career should anything go wrong, often forgetting to share their experiences on mitigating risk for the organisation. The Cavaliers, on the other hand, are a different breed. They are proud to share with you an infinite variety of techniques; some very ingenious, some bordering on irregular, and some you wish you hadn’t heard! Bottom line - they cut corners.
We were given the ‘faster procurement’ challenge on a recent assignment to deliver a managed service. We wanted to be neither cautious or cavalier; we wanted to have the best of both worlds – corners still intact.
If the services you are buying are in a mature or fairly stable market, the procurement route is often well trodden and speed can come by learning directly from others’ experiences. Open your ears and be prepared to learn from others and the answers are all around you. Our assignment required us to buy a managed service in a developing market, that has had a turbulent history and where the concept of buying an end-to-end service from one source is still fairly novel (most of the innovation and service delivery still comes from small companies who join together under fairly loose commercial arrangements). In this context, we had to develop a procurement strategy that managed risk effectively while carrying a complex supply market with us and still deliver a public sector procurement in about six months.
We are not academics or students of procurement theory - all we can offer is our experience from the front-line, hopefully in a pragmatic way that may help others in a similar situation. The procurement was only a small, but significant, part of a major initiative to deliver a new public facing service. Our focus in this article is on faster procurement, so we will not bore you with details of the programme as a whole, but needless to say this included a lot of programme and change management activity to bring the ideas to fruition. Enough pre-amble – what were the ten things we did to enable a fast procurement, without cutting any corners?
Plan, Plan & Plan - always said, often avoided!
Know what you want to buy and how you expect it fit into your business — and make sure all your stakeholders buy-into the same vision;
Prepare the Market—Let them know your plans wherever you can so they can get ready to submit a bid;
Gain Momentum - as you have planned well and know what you want you can now move quickly and engage the market (who can respond more quickly because you are clear and consistent because you have done steps 1& 2);
Tackle big issues first—when negotiating with suppliers it is all to easy to deal with the simple issues first to ‘clear the list’ - instead tackle the thorny issues early. This not only tests how both parties cope with disagreements but identifies problems early allowing you to resolve it or just decide to look elsewhere and save both organizations’ time.
Encourage all - not just the big companies but small innovative ones;
Have a BUSINESS not legal focus—when negotiating a contract focus on the business issues you are trying to resolve—all too often the lawyers are left to negotiate the contract rather than the business principals - who will have to own the outcome;
Negotiate on fact first — not emotion or haggling, much better to analyse the deal and have good factual reasons to negotiate changes rather than just ask to ‘make it cheaper’ - this will drive out good value rather than just headline price;
Get the right advisors—nothing replaces real experience!
Allocate risk where it can best be managed and make sure you have a realistic assessment of what could go wrong and the countermeasures.
More support is available through our DRIVE product - find out more >>>