John G. • From examination of your Acuity Consultants website via the above Links I noticed that William Jordan ,former head of the Office of Government Commerce favours either:
1)DWP Cipher/Capita PLC
2)Internal Buying Hub
3)Any other option of equivelent value
as his favoured choice of supply chain.
In the light of Sir Philip Green,s 32 page report to David Cameron in which Sir Philip found huge discrepancies in purchasing methods and up to 8 fold differences in prices on many products and services the first two choices seem bizarre.
Capita PLC runs Hertfordshire County Council,s services,most of Essex County Council,s HR function other than contract issuance and it runs the Schools Childrens and Families Directorate at Essex County Council.
Over the years it has developed a reputation for being extremely expensive and inefficient to the point where Housing Benefit recipients in one London Borough were reduced to penury and Private Eye the satirical magazine renamed them with the letter R inserted.
Having been through the entire tendering process at Essex County Council with 105 different Transformation Partners and consortia one wonders why anyone would make them first choice other than for reasons of size and financial strength.
The internal buying hub cannot offer value for money because if it did Sir Philip Green would not have been able to find so many holes in the procurement process.
Over the past year I have identified billions of pounds worth of waste in the MOD despite the fact that the project management standard Prince 2 is applied to all projects,procurement of weapons systems.
Prince 2 as you know is a standard which falls under and is owned by the OGC and mandates maximum tolerances of 6% to 8% yet in my lifetime the MOD has not completed a single piece of procurement or a project to consider one ,to time and to budget.
Examples include ,Blue Streak,the Basil de Ferranti affair,the Bowman Radio for the British Army,the failure to get body armour to our troops in Afghanistan on time or in sufficient quantities.
Practically anything you came up as a supply model for interims with would offer better or equivelent value but not necessarily fewer decision points unless ISP,s were to amalgamate into Transformation Partnerships with specialist guidance from leading outsourcing law firms such as Berwin Leighton Paisner which is headed up by senior partner and globally acknowledged legal expert in outsourcing Mark Lewis or someone else like him.
All but the largest ISP,s would be too small to be credible as single entities and would need to form Transformation Partnerships of sufficient critical mass.

Tony C. • John, just to clarify, the reference to William Jordan was to the "Catch 22" constraint; this is what was mandated as a temporary measure to restrict use of other procurement mechanisms pending the introduction of new frameworks. My point was that these were not as restrictive as rumour suggested. Local authorities are using other frameworks not affected by this mandate.

Do you have any thoughts on the key attributes of alternative Interim supply models?

I would suggest supply chain options need to be measured by SMART principles.

John G. • My thoughts are that to win large amounts of interim management from the Government ISP,s of sufficient size ,breadth of experience and financial standing will have to form Transformation Consortiums headed by a lawyer who understands outsourcing and is of the stature used by the Big 4 consultancies.
Whatever model you choose has to be credible and give reassurance.
So the consortium partners /Transformation Groupings would have to have the following characteristics which would rule out some of the very small providers.
--At least 10 years of track record
--Financial Soundness however the Government chooses to measure it
--A local component in terms of people it could deploy if the client wanted people who did not need to travel or wanted local people as is the case with Sandwell and certain Government offices in Scotland ,Wales and the North of England.
--10 subject matter experts between all consortium members per required discipline and 20 interims with good experience(not subject matter experts) to provide an "insurance " element if a selected interim died,became ill or was deemed unsuitable.
--Access to best in breed practice and knowledge as evidenced by the qualifications of the candidate interims.
--Interims put foreward would need to have at least 5 assignments and a decades worth of experience unless we were talking about an arcane or esoteric discipline such as Nuclear Physics or light bending cloaking device technology for the military.
--Sufficient security cleared interims for MOD work coupled with a firm committment on the part of the Government to fast track security applications for the consortium or accept a longer timeframe and greater cost.
--Adequate professional indemnity cover for the duration of the engagement.
In the past the Big 4 did not have such a stranglehold or lobbying capability deployed so ISP,s could go after individual pieces of work.
Today the environment requires a differentiated marketing led approach so what worked for ISP,s prior to mid 2009 no longer will.
The consortium would bid for particular pieces of work typically at least £2 million gbp in size up to £50 million gbp and involving Programme Directors, and sufficient interims built into cross disciplinary teams to cover each workstream.
The process could follow roughly your process flow but instead of one ISP there might be several and possibly a smaller systems integration house involved as well in the event of a large IT/telephony component to the work.
The work would be realistically scoped and would be timebound based on rigourous analysis which would have to be paid for up front so SMART principles could apply.
Without up front payment the consortium would have to charge more but even at half Big 4 charges there would be huge savings for the client plus the benefits of faster working using experienced interims rather than junior people.
I have yet to find even the most efficiently run business where I couldn't realise savings of at least 10% very early on and Government is far from efficient.
With this sort of exercise with multiple expertise you would find more and due to the need to reduce the deficit the Government would be more receptive than it might otherwise be in former good times.
An alternative might be to let the client do the analysis and then the consortium would review the analysis and fill in gaps as the work proceeded.

Tony C. • John, you appear to be thinking of taking on the Big 4 head to head, which wasn't what I had in mind when raising the question. Nothing wrong in that, just a bigger challenge than a less radical (and less far-reaching) approach. If we were to speculate on the capabilities of ISPs to mount this kind approach, there are probably only one or two firms that have the scale and resources. I can't see the IMA having the coherence. Am I missing something or would we need to look for less ambitious possibilities?

My thinking was more in terms of mid-sized ISPs who might want to be listed under new frameworks for executive interims. One way to differentiate from the current model would, for example, to have the capability to develop a business case, measure performance as work progresses, and ensure benefits realisation... very different from current hands-off approach. Another possibility is a value proposition based on stripping out client costs, without going as far a full outsourcing. This would be less contentious than outsourcing, less likely to lead to strike action, etc. I'm guessing not radical enough for you?

John G. • Tony the Big 4 have the public sector pretty much sewn up and that means they have 50% of the market and access to £12 billion gbp in spend on their work.
Unless you are going to rely solely on UK based private sector work which is shrinking except for banking and insurance you are going to have to take these people on as some nimble second tier consultancies already have.
Nothing wrong with your model at all just that the Big 4 have chosen to cover the whole market spectrum ,move into implementation consultancy and occupy ground that we used to operate on even within districts and boroughs.
A lion trapped in a corner by a newer younger lion has no choice but to fight and win or end up being eaten.
Interims and ISP's have to see what is coming and what's already here and start competing.
That means that ISP's who were caught flat footed in 2009/2010 are going to have to learn how to sell and market themselves in new ways or see a reduction in their number along with a reduction in the numbers of interim assignments and interims.
There is going to be strike action this winter anyway,over pensions and over austerity and then more trouble in the summer,particularly if the Greeks default and interest rates have to rise to pay for it.
This is against the backdrop of what the FT reported this morning ,which was a new financial black hole of £12 billion gbp which is threatening to make George Osborne,s task of deficit reduction even harder than it was a week ago.
Of course we may yet be saved by money from Libyan oil and from other dusty places

John G. • CONTINUED...
You are right about only a couple of ISP's having sufficient size,which is why I advocated a consortium approach involving several ISP's in combination plus middle ranking software houses and systems integration houses to build to critical mass.