Challenge

We recently supported Buckinghamshire County Council’s transition to a single unitary authority, making sure they were able to maintain their service delivery for residents.

The council delivered the programme through their internal team but recognised the need for support and insight to improve their approach and overall governance of the change programme.

Approach

We started with a review of the programme’s initial set up and plan revealed areas for improvement. This led to us taking the lead on several crucial projects within the programme that included reviewing the approach to Fees and Charging, rebranding for the new council, the ICT workstream including access control and the internal intranet.

We coached the council’s internal team to enhance their approach, sharing our extensive experience in delivering complex projects and supporting other unitary programmes. Our advisory role also included helping the programme director target areas we felt were cause for concern, working together to decide upon the best solution quickly.

To make sure activity was prioritised to meet core deliverables and milestones, we supported the internal team to review their milestones and dependencies to keep the workload manageable.

As a supportive tool, we developed a “real time” programme assessment model to show the impact of the slippage versus the reality of the delivery, broken down to align the governance structure of the programme. We also ran “go-live” readiness assessments to identify any operational challenges which may exist on Day one, creating areas of focus for the team.

With the Council’s PMO lead, we helped oversee a successful vesting date as all other resources were deferred onto COVID-19 response. We then worked with the service directors to review these outstanding deliverables and make sure they were handed over into BAU.

Impact

Despite the enormity of the change, the new council successfully went live during COVID-19 with no impact on the services residents received. The new council can now continue on its journey to deliver outstanding services to its residents consistently across the County footprint of Buckinghamshire.