OUR PROJECTS CORPORATE SERVICES FEASIBILITY STUDY

CLIENT: Social Wellbeing Agency
DATE: 2021
STATUS: Provided justification to invest in future state

The Social Wellbeing Agency (SWA) is a central government organisation that supports social sector decision-makers, providing cross-social sector advice on issues that impact social wellbeing.

To do this SWA aims to identify opportunities to develop tools, and approaches such as supporting budget processes, economic appraisal, data collection, commissioning, and priority-setting.

To ensure SWA continues to be well positioned to achieve its aims, the agency commissioned a review of its corporate services to see if they could be better, or more cost-effectively delivered, by considering alternative providers or delivery models.

Rationale was engaged to undertake a feasibility study to:

• Explore how best to provide SWA with excellent corporate services at a reasonable cost.
• Review alignment with good practice public service back-office support arrangements.
• Assess the implications of any option proposed including:
  cost implications,
  broader considerations e.g. implementation timeframes.

WHAT DID WE DO?

Rationale approached this project using our tried and tested “deep-dive” approach, designed to help identify problems, benefits and options in a timely manner. This ensured the project built and maintained momentum, delivering results efficiently and effectively.

This involved inviting a group of ‘informed participants’ to attend ILM and optioneering workshops, held over two days. The group included a combination of subject matter experts both from within SWA, as well as other agencies, and some from SWA’s executive leadership team.

The deep-dive workshops identified a long list of options, which were evaluated against the investment objectives and critical success factors using a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) tool.

From this, three options were shortlisted to be taken forward, with the likely costs, benefits and risks of each option being assessed in more detail. This was done by using the previous MCA and supplementing it with information obtained from potential suppliers, to validate the likely achievability, costs and delivery timeframes associated with each option.