Civil Service Capabilities - A discussion paper

Civil Service Capabilities - A discussion paper

http://tinyurl.com/zdgtf8w

Improving overall Project Management Capability and Skills

http://goo.gl/ywZPhR

NAO Guide: Initiating successful projects

http://tinyurl.com/hvbdn8s

Over-optimism in government projects

https://goo.gl/pnnKY6

Skills for improved productivity, employment growth and development

http://tinyurl.com/hwmwfdw

Conclusions on skills for improved productivity, employment growth and development

http://tinyurl.com/hqlxl59

Insights and Trends:Current Programme and Project Management Practices*

http://tinyurl.com/h7rxhkb

Developing Civil Service Skills: a unified approach

http://tinyurl.com/z6pfaru

Identifying where skills are needed 

http://goo.gl/Sr5HNf

Managing public money

http://tinyurl.com/j74aw8j

Commercial Skills for Complex Government Projects

https://goo.gl/Vew8ui

http://tinyurl.com/h8awcso

Commercial skills for complex government projects - Appendices Two, Three and Glossary

http://tinyurl.com/h4q2mo6

Identifying and meeting central government’s skills requirements

http://tinyurl.com/zbnwsrq

Methodology 

https://goo.gl/UPlZqM

Meeting the low carbon skills challenge

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31573/10-849-low-carbon-skills-consultation.pdf

Realising Talent: employment and skills for the future

http://tinyurl.com/zb84wrv

Sector insights: skills and performance challenges in the  health and social care sector

http://tinyurl.com/hol4skh

Matching Skills and Labour Market Needs - Building Social Partnerships for Better Skills and Better Jobs   

http://tinyurl.com/hes6hqn

Commercial skills for complex government projects

"Commercial skills are essential to success in complex projects and a great deal of money rests on this; but there is still not a coherent system for providing skills across government or for using the existing skills as efficiently as possible."

The National Audit Office has warned that the value for money of 43 major government projects worth around £200 billion is at risk because of significant weaknesses in the Government’s commercial skills and expertise. But there is an even greater risk to many other complex projects where skills shortages are not being assessed systematically.

The private sector has an increasing role in delivering public services. It is, therefore, critical that Government has staff with the commercial skills and experience to interact with the private sector. However, departments continue to experience a shortage of staff with the commercial skills and experience needed to design and deliver complex projects successfully. A 2009 review by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) found that 44 per cent of Senior Responsible Owners of major projects did not have any substantial commercial experience.

The biggest skills gaps for Government are in contract management, commissioning and managing advisers, risk identification and management, and business acumen.

The Government has attempted to fill its skills gap with temporary staff and consultants. Thirteen departments have provided information showing that over a third of their staff spending in Commercial Directorates is on temporary staff. Some departments also rely heavily on the support of specialist advisers. While both can make a valuable contribution, over-reliance can lead to higher project costs and loss of knowledge when temporary staff and advisers move on.

The Government is not using its scarce commercial staff resource to best effect. Departments lack information on the expertise, skills and availability of staff and there is no formal mechanism to allocate staff and expertise across government departments. 

Pressure to reduce public spending can conflict with the need to invest in staff with the commercial skills to deliver complex projects. The culture of staff frequently moving positions within a department often leads to commercial experience and expertise being lost by projects and by individuals.

Fourteen of 16 departmental commercial directors believe OGC has done little to address skills gaps within their department, although ultimate responsibility for commercial skills remains with departments. The OGC has introduced a number of initiatives aimed at improving commercial skills, such as Building the procurement profession in government. But OGC and departments are not working together effectively and are having limited impact. As a result, the value for money of the £1.5 million a year that OGC has been spending on initiatives is at risk. OGC needs to work with departments to establish standard approaches to dealing with the commercial sector. 

"Tight public funding means that departments must find ambitious new ways of working to maintain and drive up levels of performance. Key elements of success will be knowing what skills are needed and which staff have them, and then deploying those staff to where they are most needed. These key elements are not presently in place in many departments and need to be driven urgently to be in step with major change programmes."

Despite major expenditure by central government departments on developing the skills of their staff, government does not know how much is being spent and has rarely evaluated its impact on performance. Government’s estimate of £275 million (or £547 for each civil servant) in 2009-10 is a significant underestimate. In addition, only 48 per cent of civil servants said that the learning and development they received in the last 12 months had helped them to be better at their job.

Today’s report by the National Audit Office notes that, while the picture is not uniform, weaknesses in departmental strategies and governance arrangements for identifying and addressing skills needs have limited the effectiveness of skills development activities in meeting departmental business needs. Management responsibilities have been complicated and unclear, leading to incomplete and unreliable information on what skills development is being undertaken, by which members of staff and at what cost.

Insufficient standardisation across departments and limited use of central government’s buying power to cut costs have undermined value for money. At one stage, there were over 250 different leadership courses in use across government, with charges for management and leadership training varying four-fold between suppliers. There has also not been enough attention to on-the-job learning, with unnecessary costs incurred through over-reliance on more expensive forms of training and poor management of attendance rates.

Government has recognized some of these issues and has recently introduced major changes to the way departmental HR functions operate, designed to achieve efficiencies and better alignment with departmental business needs. A new cross-government learning and development service called Civil Service Learning became operational in April 2011. While these changes are designed to address some of the weaknesses identified by the NAO, it is too early to say if they will be implemented consistently and effectively across departments.

In the last three years the National Audit Office has examined some 40 major government projects, a number comparable to previous years. One clear lesson we have learned from the evidence base which our back catalogue provides is that the quality of project initiation is highly predictive of project success. We are therefore re-focusing our studies earlier in the project lifecycle to better assess the quality of, and to influence successful, project initiation. We will follow these early interventions with results based studies as the project rolls out. In preparing this Guide, and undertaking our evaluation work, we find it helpful to focus on a few key elements which, in our experience, have affected project delivery. These are:

Purpose – having clarity on the overall priorities and desired outcomes;

Affordability – understanding what delivery will cost and not being over-optimistic;

Pre-commitment – having robust internal assessment and challenge to establish if the project is feasible;

Project set-up – the detailed specification, procurement, contract and incentive design; and

Delivery and variation management – maintaining delivery pressure throughout the life of the contract and flexibility to recover the integrity of the project in light of unanticipated events or significant variations from the original plan.