Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 22
22
Accepted
Shared services clusters undertaking valuable lessons learned exercises, showing early positive outcomes.
Conclusion
The Cabinet Office said that each cluster has undertaken a lessons learned exercise. For example, the ‘Synergy’ cluster’s outline business case explicitly goes through the lessons learned and says how those are addressed in their programme.42 The Department for Work & Pensions noted that one of the lessons learned from previous shared services strategies was the lack of alignment around data configuration. Its cluster now has a common top 50 data sets, which align to the work that the Cabinet Office is doing.43 The overseas cluster launched its new service in November 2022 and the Cabinet Office highlighted the importance of sharing lessons from this experience with the other four clusters.44 36 Q 67; C&AG’s Report, para 12 37 Qq 32, 64, 67 38 Qq 64, 67, 88 39 Qq 31, 88–90 40 Qq 41, 53, 55, 88, 91 41 Committee of Public Accounts, Use of evaluation and modelling in government, Fourth Report of Session 2022–23, HC 254, May 2022; Committee of Public Accounts, Measuring and reporting public sector greenhouse gas emissions, Twenty-Third Report of Session 2022–23, HC 39, November 2022; and Committee of Public Accounts, Improving the Accounting Officer Assessment process, Twenty-Eighth Report of Session 2022–23, HC 43, November 2022. 42 Q 61 43 Q 12 44 Q 67 14 Government Shared Services
Government Response Summary
The government agrees and states that it is progressing a lessons learned strategy, with a target implementation date of June 2025. They have initiated various activities including creating toolkits, holding events, incorporating lessons from other programmes, and facilitating working groups, with the Overseas cluster committing to share its lessons within four months.
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government
Accepted
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: June 2025 (following completion of procurements) This is mainly being progressed through the relationship management function. In the last few months, there have been a number of lessons learned events with 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.