- Public, Wednesday 13 May 2009 16.27 BST
Since the Gershon review set out its ambitious savings targets, there has been enormous pressure on local authorities to make savings while simultaneously delivering service improvements.
Inevitably, some have been more successful at this than others. With regard to HR, many authorities have chosen to do this via the shared services model.
This can be a hugely complex and expensive process in itself, but one innovative and potentially cost effective way is through increased collaboration across authorities in order to generate savings.
This raises its own set of problems. Dealing with mixed political views on how to manage services in local authorities has always been complex and increases the challenges of obtaining agreement to change.
From agreeing which services will be delivered and the design model, councils such as those in the connecting south east Wales project and, at a district level, in East Kent, have achieved success only by hard work at building consensus across the political spectrum.
It's critical to build engagement early and to begin by making clear to each council the benefits such change can bring.
Wendy Head, the corporate director at Shepway district council, leads the East Kent shared services project.
She says: "Crucial to our delivery of the East Kent shared HR service has been getting the collaboration right. The success of the project is founded on an absolute consensus amongst all partners that a shared service is the way forward in addressing the individual challenges faced by the partners.
Belief, trust and engagement
It is this belief, trust and engagement that has enabled the project group to rise to the challenges of securing agreement to change from both officers and politicians."
Reengineering a service to be both better and cheaper is no easy task and building a business case to do it in an environment where scope to invest in change can be limited is challenging too.
In south east Wales, the most important part of the process was building a consensus of politicians and managers, staff and trade unionists, says Jo Farrar, the chief executive of Bridgend county borough council.
"This can take a great deal of time but the investment in establishing clear aims and ownership is vital. Having created the common understanding the development of the business case and service design was built on shared values and aspirations."
Unfortunately, many shared services projects fail due to lack of consensus in the design. If key groups cannot see the benefit then, at the very least, they may demonstrate passive resistance that slows up the process. At worst, they can derail the entire change.
Getting a design which the organisation as well as HR have had a hand in creating is key to setting up a successful transformation.
"I have been involved in a number of these projects, but this time we really had to make the case that this was the right thing to do," says Deb Clarke, the HR director at the London borough of Tower Hamlets and primary care trust.
"In the end, difficult as it was, answering the question as to why we should change the HR service was a very productive challenge from the organisation. It got us to a better answer. We got managers involved in the design process by tapping into their aspiration to maintain our position as a high performing authority. We put HR in line with that agenda."
Jo Radford is a senior consultant at HR transformation consultancy, Orion Partners
