Atkins Breakfast Briefing (9/11/06)
Shared Services: "Getting out of the Ground"
On November 9 the latest in the popular Atkins Breakfast Briefing series took a look at the parallels between creating shared services and undertaking large building projects. With government at an early stage of its shared service journey the analogy provides confidence that the transformational strategy can be achieved by employing the same skills and repeatable processes that have ensured the creation of many successful construction projects.
The event kicked off with a short video showing the many parallels between the various stages of a project to create a building versus creating shared services. David Myers added that the Atkins skills and experience of managing large projects together with bringing together partner organisations is vital to achieving success in the shared services initiative.
Roy Barden, from Catalise, talked about the need to align shared services with Policies that sharing enables and explained the need for a practical approach and methodology with adequately skilled people that understand the domain and most importantly the need to get buy-in from the collaborating organisations.
Mervyn Newton, formerly Director of Business Service Delivery for GlaxoSmithKline, told the story of how GSK got their shared service centre “out of the ground”. He explained the drivers that lead them to implement a Shared Services Centre, the challenges they faced during the implementation and the success factors around organisation and governance structures. Mervyn concluded with a reflection on the lessons learnt and how things continue to change and develop in the competitive private sector environment.
A public sector perspective was given by Ruth Ormsby from the Department of Health. A key message from Ruth was that having tried and failed to do shared services themselves the NHS needed private sector expertise and eventually formed a joint venture with Xansa. Jonathan Morgan, NHS Shared Business Services, explained the SBS operating model which is designed so that not doing shared services cannot be justified.
The panel discussion explored how some of the barriers to introducing shared services have been overcome and David Myers gave his perspective on how we sell shared services to the individual stakeholders within the public sector landscape.
Conclusions from the event?
- The skills required to deliver shared services are not a black art, they do exist and are being employed to deliver a variety of successful projects;
- Partnering, good programme and project management and stakeholder buy-in are a key success factors for delivering shared services;
- In order to sell it to the different stakeholders we have to show evidence, understand their issues and demonstrate a greater good.