Agenda item

Verbal briefing on the work of Deloitte on the Council’s improvement and efficiency action plan.

Cathy Tyson (Assistant Director, Policy) briefed members and answered questions on the work with Deloitte on the Council’s improvement and efficiency programme. She reported that the action plan had been launched in September 2009, and contained 32 projects to meet the two objectives of improvement and efficiency. Particularly strong emphasis was on customer access, with the use of face-to-face contact to be reserved for people with the most complex level of needs. A lot of research had been carried out on the staffing structure, which was central to identifying opportunities for streamlining. Work had also been carried out around benchmark performance and costs. Internal processes had been reviewed, for example, procurement, which was a very complex project. In view of the fact that the Council had not carried out service transformation on this scale in the recent past, it was felt that it did not have all the right project management skills or capacity for this. A competitive tendering exercise was conducted to seek an external partner to work with the Council to develop a Programme and Project Management Office as a corporate resource for managing the programme. Part of the role was to ensure standardisation, promote challenge, ensure appropriate governance and, most critically, have benefits realisation. Deloitte were the successful bidders. One of the major components of the tender invitation related to skills transfer and the training and development of staff so that the Programme Management Office (PMO) would be run by the Council itself within six months.

Cathy Tyson informed the Panel that the contract with Deloitte consisted of four work streams – leadership of change, project activity, establishing the PMO and operating systems, and training activity. Deloitte had started work on site in November 2009, reporting to the Director of Policy and Regeneration, but working on a daily basis with other directors and reporting on progress to the Chief Executive and the Council’s Corporate Management Team. An important focus was to ensure that appropriate information was available and that the right decisions in were taken in the right place. The Deloitte team had carried out a health check on the gold projects, identifying five focal projects critical to the success of the improvement and efficiency strategy – the transformation of customer contact, the strategic property review, the streamlining of financial management, the strategic procurement review and the implementation of the structure and staffing review.

The PMO was working on designing staffing, with core functions and job descriptions, as well as developing templates for reporting and a communication strategy. Most of the staff in the PMO were internal, apart from three senior posts about to advertised. An initial two-day training project had focussed on skills and capability self-assessment. Over all, Cathy Tyson informed the Panel, Deloitte had made significant progress in ensuring the right management infrastructure for major change, an issue with which the Council had struggled in the past.

Asked about the cost of Deloitte’s involvement, Cathy Tyson reported that this depended on the number of consultants involved on a given day. However, the overall investment had been planned as proportionate to what would be achieved in efficiency savings. Duncan McLeod added that the average cost per consultant was around £800 per day. Cathy Tyson informed the Panel that the contract was for six months and that, within that period, stages of handing over control to the Council were built in so that, over the six month period, the role of Deloitte would diminish and the Council’s role would increase. She added that additional benefits of using Deloitte related to the challenge and discipline offered, and the support in prioritising and sequencing actions. With experience of carrying out change programmes in other organisations, the Deloitte team was able to alert Brent to potential problems, and the project leads had found this aspect of Deloitte’s work very helpful.

Asked whether Deloitte had sufficient autonomy to assess and challenge the Council’s progress, Cathy Tyson informed the Panel that independent scrutiny was very clearly part of the brief for Deloitte. Duncan McLeod added that Deloitte’s work was robust and independent. This independence was also reinforced by the fact that the Director of Policy and Regeneration, to whom the Deloitte team reported, was not responsible for any of the projects in the Council’s improvement and efficiency action plan.

RESOLVED:

that the verbal update be noted.