Historically, the public sector has been extremely risk adverse, and has used management consultants for delivery of their strategies and solutions. But with spending under scrutiny, using a well known professional services company is no longer an affordable luxury.
Management consultants will typically be less experienced than their interim management counterparts and in general, they charge twice the daily rates of interim managers. With their practical capabilities and focus on delivery, interim managers will be sought out in local government to replace management consultants where they are used inappropriately.
Buying Solutions, the national procurement partner for UK public services anticipates that £2.5bn will be spent on non-permanent staff, including interim managers, over the next four years. Key areas where they will be used increasingly include specialist project management leadership in coordinating key programmes of work, such as flu pandemic programmes and adult social care programmes and also in delivering expert procurement and commercial guidance in crucial areas such as shared services and category management.
In many areas, change management programmes led by interim managers are already underway. The government's FiReControl project will soon see the current 46 fire control services in England amalgamated into just nine new regional control centres and interim managers are leading some of these major change programmes to transfer local operations.
Interims are also being used to look at other areas such as employee performance, recruitment and retention. Essex county council, for example, recently hired Samson Jebutu, an experienced HR interim, to implement a new recruitment and retention strategy for its Schools, Children and Family Directorate. Like many UK social services departments it faced a shortage of skilled social workers as well as other hard-to-fill roles, such as educational psychologists and youth workers.
This shortfall in Essex is now being addressed with a new international recruitment campaign and a retention strategy that is improving employee engagement and retention at all levels.
The pressure is on in local government. With a cap on council tax, a global recession and with local government funding settlements tighter than ever, income streams are simply drying up.
No choice but to cut costs
In spite of this, the government has put its foot down and local authorities will have no choice but to cut costs, increase efficiency across the board and improve the quality of services they deliver to the public.
In his budget the chancellor Alastair Darling demanded £600m of savings next year and £5.5bn worth of savings over the current spending review period, instead of the previous target of £4.9bn, an increase of 12%
Key areas have been singled out for efficiency savings including procurement, back office functions and asset management. To achieve these quite significant targets, major change is required in the way that local authorities operate.
One of the main challenges councils face is they just don't have the resources in place to achieve these targets and to run the strategic change management programmes required to reduce costs and improve services.
Last year, the public sector accounted for 45% of all interim management assignments and a third of those were in local government, an 8% increase on the previous year.
The main reasons interim managers are proving increasingly popular are because they bring to the table commercial knowhow and change management experience that is missing in the sector. In addition, they deliver results quickly and move on; they don't want to hang around, which means they are cost effective.
The very reason that these people are brought in is to deliver efficiencies, so by the very nature of their work they must offer return on investment.
These are also professionals looking to build their careers and reputations, for them winning new contracts means they must deliver to ensure future work.
With the government's transformation agenda in full swing, we will see many more interim managers working in the engine rooms of local councils all across the UK, driving efficiencies and ringing in the changes.
Gary Lawton is director of public sector, Russam GMS
