Office of Government Commerce

The business…

OGC is an independent office of the Treasury and works with public sector organisations to help them improve their efficiency, gain better value for money from their commercial activities and deliver improved success from programmes and projects. The priorities are to support the delivery of:

The public sector's £21.5bn annual efficiency gains by 2007/08

£3bn saving by 2007/08 in central Government procurement

Improvement in the success rate of mission critical projects

What OGC were doing…

Delivery is top of the Government 's agenda and better project and programme management (PPM) will improve the capacity to deliver. Research conducted by the Office of Public Services Reform (OPSR) and Centre for Management and Policy Studies (CMPS) shows that increasingly PPM techniques are successfully being applied to policy development and delivery, as well as traditional procurement tasks.

In response to the Prime Minister's concerns over continuing weaknesses in project delivery, the Improving Programme and Project Delivery (IPPD) project was established in September 2001.The project, led by OPSR and involving the OGC, was charged with developing a package of measures to achieve significant and sustainable improvement in programme and project delivery. One of these was the OGC led initiative of Embedding (Project and Programme Management) Centres of Excellence (ECoE) within Central Departments.

How Echopark helped…

Echopark was engaged to provide an Interim Manager to help embed PPM Centres of Excellence (CoE) into a number of Central Departments and agencies, including:

The Cabinet Office

DfES

DWP

Her Majesty's Treasury

OGC

OfSTED

National Savings & Investments

With the acknowledgement of the level of skill and experience in PPM, Echopark were asked to embed a CoE within OGC itself, as well as the other Departments as detailed above.

As Interim Managers for OGC, Echopark wore and reflected the brand, ethos and approach of OGC - in essence they were OGC consultants and not external consultants to the business.

Over a period of over a year, Echopark analysed the PPM needs of Departments and worked at Exec Board level to provide strategic and management support to help embed effective programme and project management to drive Performance, Process and Organisational changes and improvements across the Departmental PPM.

Reporting to Department Permanent Secretaries and to No.10 on the Prime Minister's Mission Critical and High Risk programmes and projects, Echopark worked as trusted advisers to each Department. Using a collaborative approach, Echopark was able to impart expert PPM skills and knowledge and help each department develop their own PPM capability and capacity.

Echopark also helped Departments, more advanced in the application of PPM, take on take on the responsibility of conducting their own Medium Risk Gateway Reviews, through the OGC Medium Risk Delegation process, as well as providing expert support for High Risk OGC Gateway Reviews.

As Interim Managers, Echopark was successful in helping to implement a complex and challenging change initiative across the public sector with PPM Centres of Excellence being embedded into all of the central UK public Sector Departments and contributing to the Prime Minister's objective of better public sector project delivery.

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