My
colleague Dominic was teaching our programme for the Welsh LGA in Cardiff
recently. So no surprises that he chose a rugby metaphor for the politics of
shared services.
A current
problem in public shared services is similar to a game of rugby in which the
ball is stuck eternally in the scrum between the leadership of the partnering
organisations. In fact it is a scrum which frequently collapses, and therefore
rarely does the ball come out so that a try can be scored by the rest of the
team. In shared service teaching and research circles we call it the “4 by 24
Rule”.
The rule
is: It takes about four months to prepare a compelling shared service business
plan, but another 24 months for the business plan to either turn into a
delivery plan or be shelved.
So what
are the key issues academics evidence as the cause of this problem?
- The
most recurrent reason that the scrum collapses so frequently is because of a
lack of trust and shared vision between the leadership in the partners. No
matter how good the business case, or the project team; no matter how much
development money you have in the kitty, if there is a lack of trust and shared
vision between the partners, a shared service project will repeatedly stumble
or collapse.
SOLACE reported in 2009 that the reason most shared services go wrong is when “expected outcomes are not clearly shared”. And, in CIPFA’s excellent Jan 2010 guidance note, Sharing the Gain, they state that “effective collaborative working is first and foremost a human and political challenge”. This explains why there are so many compelling shared service business cases, lounging un-used on the shelf in Chief Execs offices.
- The second reason is that senior managers in the public sector are not equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to solve the “collapsing scrum” problem. It’s certainly not solved by PRINCE2 which does not even have the words “partnership” or “trust” in its index. Nor will benchmarking, or business process reviews solve the problem.
In a
year-long research study at Canterbury Christ Church University we identified
the top 20 key shared service skills and pieces of knowledge, that someone like
you needs if they are to be successful in developing a shared service and
stopping the collapsing scrum problem. In order of importance, skills in
PRINCE2, benchmarking and business process review come in 13th. The
top three requisite skills or knowledge are:
1.
Building
and sustaining strong trust across leaders’ relationships in multi-partner
collaborations
2.
Creating
a positive shared vision for a partnership that may be drawn from a range of
partners of unequal size and authority
3.
Understanding
how to support decision makers in creating policy for selecting appropriate
in-house services to share
Learning
these skills is a key part of the Post Graduate Certificate in Shared Service
Architecture at Canterbury Christ Church University. Open to senior managers
across the public sector the outcome of the certificate is a significant
reduction in collapsing scrums, more shared service “tries” and a key
qualification on an aspiring manager’s CV when the job cuts start to bite. Over
700 leaders and senior managers have been through the first module of the
postgraduate certificate and over 40 of them have continued their studies and
have graduated with the full certificate and become recognised as Shared
Service Archtiects.
You can find out more about the Postgraduate
Certificate in Shared Services at http://www.sharedservicearchitects.co.uk/Find-Out-More-About-Canterbury-Christ-Church-University-Postgraduate-Certificate-In-Shared-Services
