Talking to Partners about Shared Services

Earlier today councillors from the Performance and Finance Overview and Scrutiny Board held a focus group for local partners as part of their review of shared services.

The focus group included people from the police, the health sector, Swansea University, Job Centre Plus and Swansea Council for Voluntary Services.  

The purpose was both to learn from experiences of shared services that people had and to see what ideas people had for possible new shared services projects.

There were many excellent points made, far to many to mention here, but to give you a flavour here are some of the themes from the discussion:

• The potential for making savings where similar organisations e.g. police forces or health trusts, share back office functions such as payroll
• The importance of robust planning and clear business cases for shared service projects
• The role of strong leadership from the top down in driving projects
• The importance of relationships and trust – both individual and organisational
• The need to treat back office and front office shared service projects differently
• The need to encourage and support the development of new shared service projects and the possible role of the Better Swansea Partnership in doing this

There were also some interesting suggestions for specific shared service projects but you will have to wait for the final report to see those!  Don’t worry you won’t have to wait too long.  The report is due to be agreed by the Board at the beginning of April.