A flagship shared services centre for 10 local councils
was delayed by more than six months because of a lack of
preparation by some of the councils and difficulties with
commercial partners.
All 10 councils in Staffordshire have been implementing a
jointly procured customer relationship management system as part of
a shared services programme called Staffordshire Connects.
The project is one of the largest shared services
implementations in local government and its progress will be
closely monitored by other councils that are under pressure to
collaborate to deliver shared services.
In a frank appraisal of the project at the Society for IT
Management's Business Transformation conference in Birmingham last
week, Staffordshire Connects programme manager Tim Chesworth
highlighted both the benefits it would deliver and the frustrations
in implementing it.
He told delegates, "We should have aimed to get everybody live
by the end of 2004. I think that would have been a realistic
timescale."
However, work on implementation of the Oracle LG45 CRM
application did not begin until May 2004, with the first council,
Lichfield District Council, going live in September 2004.
The other councils involved are Cannock Chase, East
Staffordshire, Newcastle-under-Lyme, South Staffordshire, Stoke,
Stafford, Staffordshire County, Staffordshire Moorlands and
Tamworth.
Most of the remaining authorities did not go live until last
summer, while Staffordshire County Council, one of the two big
authorities in the shared service project, is still implementing
it.
Key lessons from the project, said Chesworth, include having
commercial partners who understand the systems "inside out".
He added, "We did not give enough support to some of the
districts. Because of the [state of] readiness of some of the
authorities, it took a little bit longer than anticipated."
The CRM implementation would also have benefited from more staff
and better training of the call-centre staff who had to use the
application, he said.
One implementation of Oracle LG45 will run across all 10
authorities. The councils have saved more than £2.5m by procuring
the system jointly rather than independently.
Implementation problems emerged when the project deviated from
the Prince 2 project management methodology. It also became clear
that despite each authority signing up to a common platform to link
front-line services, each had its own goals and corporate
objectives.
Despite these difficulties, Chesworth was enthusiastic about the
project's potential. "We had no commonality of services, but now I
believe we are about to leverage major efficiencies," he told
delegates.