One of the lessons from the Shared Services Strategy for Government was the importance of building communities. Any project is delivered by people. A programme even more so, and with five programmes that each span multiple organisations, the importance of bringing people together can’t be stressed enough.
The first community was the senior leaders, they would meet for governance purposes, but we didn’t stop there. We established a number of working groups, starting with the Enterprise Architects from each of the five Clusters and then extending to other functions. We soon had over a dozen different working groups bringing together people from the clusters and sometimes the Departments as well.
This had multiple benefits:
- People were able to learn from each other. Not all the Clusters were on the same schedule, so those who were at an earlier stage in their journey could learn from those ahead of them.
- People could get moral support from their peers. It can be hard to be in a cluster team, continually working to bring people in different Departments into alignment. Having a network of others who understand and can offer support and encouragement was helpful.
- As with any organisation, there was staff turnover. The working groups helped the new people get up to speed quicker and build their networks faster. They could ask the “stupid” questions in a safe space (we all know that no question you ask is stupid, only the one’s you don’t ask).
Just as we in the Cabinet Office Shared Services team created groups across the five Clusters, each multi-Department Cluster created working groups across their Departments. Sometime we were invited to join these internal working groups, which further helped communications.
Delivering change at this scale is hard. A colleague pointed out that the Shared Services Strategy was the only initiative that involved every Department working together since the Second World War. It’s that significant.
We couldn’t make this happen by only relying on messages being cascaded from the top: we all know how fragile this approach is. Any one person in the chain can choose not to pass a message on and everyone below them misses out. Messages are also vulnerable to re-interpretation as they are passed on. It’s very common for managers to add their own perspective or spin on a message, so it gets distorted.
Having direct lines of communication through the working groups enabled the expert practitioners in each Cluster organisation to get direct access to accurate information and to be able to ask questions of an expert who could explain the rationale behind it.
If you are looking to bring organisations together in a joint venture of this nature, then I would recommend building communities as a great accelerator.
ERP Success 