Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 6
6
Accepted
Disseminate positive and negative lessons from the Shared Services Strategy for future projects.
Conclusion
There are lessons to be learned from this strategy that will be applicable to future government projects. We have often reported on the challenges that government faces in delivering cross-departmental initiatives, programmes and strategies. A number of these issues continue to cause problems for the current iteration of the Shared Services Strategy. The Cabinet Office says that clusters have worked to learn lessons from previous strategies, and there has been a noticeable change in pace since the introduction of the 2021 strategy refresh. Based on our previous experience, we have concerns that the strategy’s timeline is overly ambitious. There will be further lessons, both positive and negative, coming out of the development and implementation of this strategy that will be applicable to future cross-government projects. Recommendation 6: The Cabinet Office should disseminate both positive and negative lessons learned from designing and implementing this strategy for other future cross-government projects to build on. 8 Government Shared Services 1 The government’s Shared Services Strategy
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and is actively disseminating lessons learned through a stock of documents, tools, and working groups. Examples include incorporating lessons from other programmes, learning from international governments, and committing to future sharing of insights, with briefings offered through IPA.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. clusters as they reach different milestones in their implementations. There is now a stock of lessons learned documents and tools for clusters to use. Examples include: • meetings have taken place with the Canadian Government to gain insight into their implementation of their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. • lessons from programmes such as Home Office Metis (Cloud ERP) programme have been incorporated into Cluster Business Cases. • within the Defence cluster, there is the civilian HR system ’MyHR’ which went live in February 2022. A lessons learned was completed, with reports of a positive impact on user experience overall. • Project Adopt is the business adoption of cloud services including interoperability, it learns from previous programmes and industry best practices, to aid the adoption of best practice cloud services within government. • OneGov cloud contains a lessons learned toolkit which is easily accessible. • The Shared Services Strategy team facilitates numerous working groups which act as communities of best practice intended to support clusters with implementation of the Strategy. Additionally, Overseas have committed to share their lessons learnt in the next 4 months. Throughout Strategy development and implementation there has been a seeking out and sharing of insights from other GMPP projects, industry and other states/governments on similar journeys. The Shared Services Strategy team through IPA will offer briefings to other GMPP programmes as necessary.