Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Accepted
Develop methods to track overall progress of the Shared Services Strategy and cluster milestones.
Conclusion
The Cabinet Office has yet to start monitoring overall progress of the government’s Shared Services Strategy. The Cabinet Office has no performance indicators that measure strategy progress. Shared services performance measures consider only business-as-usual service provision such as payroll accuracy, invoice accuracy, end- user satisfaction, government transfers and mobility of services, as well as a further 40 measures. These measures do not allow the Cabinet Office to understand the progress being made on this major programme of change. For example, there are no indicators to monitor progress on data and process standardisation. The Cabinet Office told us it will shortly begin working on designing and implementing new indicators which will allow them to track delivery against planned milestones and understand delivery progress. Once these are in place, it will introduce benchmarks that will allow it to assess its own performance against current standards of good practice in similar external initiatives. Recommendation 5: When the Cabinet Office writes to us in six months, it should include an update about the methods it has developed to track the overall progress of the Shared Services Strategy, including how it is tracking clusters’ progress towards milestones. Government Shared Services 7
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and has begun developing a new set of performance metrics, using a portfolio-light approach, to monitor the overall progress of the Shared Services Strategy and track clusters' progress by sourcing top-line information across government.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. recognition that these measures need to evolve as the Strategy is implemented. At the time of the NAO report, the focus on performance and quality was baselining current performance across back-office systems and ensuring continuity of quality as change was introduced. In the last few months a new set of performance metrics have begun to be developed to monitor progress in terms of implementation of new systems but also show improvement in service. This includes taking a portfolio light approach to monitoring progress, by sourcing the top-line information from across government, both from Clusters and Supporting Programmes such as Interoperability, to provide a single perspective across government on progress against the Strategy. Against this are the products that strategy directorate are providing to underpin the Strategy, and using this to gauge future capability and capacity needs.