Our thoughts

Wednesday’s Autumn Budget may draw mixed views, as with any budget. At Herd, we were particularly interested in the 2% productivity, efficiencies and savings target for government departments.

“The government is driving efficiencies and reducing wasteful spending. The Budget sets a 2% productivity, efficiencies and savings target for government departments and has formally launched the Office for Value for Money to realise benefits from every pound of public spending”

Source: Autumn Budget 2024

Having personally worked within two major central government departments for 5 years prior to establishing Herd, I can hand-on-heart say that almost every civil servant I worked with, genuinely wanted to do the best for the citizens they served. The sense of duty is ingrained within all.

The majority of UK citizens will at some point have likely engaged with a digital service provided by the government, whether that’s to apply for Child Benefit, renew your passport or driving licence, or submit your tax return, to name just a few services. They are generally well-designed, efficient, and do the job effectively. My own background was in this digital space, and it’s what attracted me to the Civil Service after 10 years in the corporate world. The opportunity to really make a difference. This is the same thing that attracts many professionals into government.

When compared to what is offered by other international Governments, UK citizen-facing digital services are regarded as some of the best out there. You don’t need 20 bits of paper, posting off to multiple places. You can generally start and end your user journey within the one service. That’s not saying there isn’t room for improvement, of course there is.

However, what is often overlooked are the back office, day-to-day processes, performed by hundreds of thousands of civil servants every day. The stuff that should take a few minutes, such as requesting basic payroll changes for you or your team, booking train travel, submitting travel expenses, requesting purchase orders, or trying to decipher overly complex HR policies – typically require significant time investments. So instead of taking minutes, they can take hours and often multiple requests to get right. Or to put it another way, instead of being 2% of your working week, it can take 10-20% of your working week.

So why are these day-to-day processes and systems often overlooked? Well, there are many reasons. One being that these are typically cross-department systems, so any change is difficult. They require cross-departmental working, there is complexity in understanding who should contribute what % to the budget to make the change, they may be tied into long-lasting contracts with third party providers, and, being blunt, they are just less sexy to talk about. After all, no senior leader, in any organisation or sector, wants to spend time talking about the day-to-day HR or finance processes. They’re seen as boring. They’re not the reason that organisation exists. They don’t directly tackle the big challenges or opportunities. 

But let’s reframe it another way. Let’s imagine what you could do with those savings, whether they be £s or time. Imagine if every civil servant got back a few hours a week to do truly impactful, core work: work that did tackle the big challenges and opportunities. Imagine the positive impact that could have on both our public services and our public purse, and the wellbeing of the civil servants working to do the best job at the best value for money for citizens.

Now imagine the opportunity cost of not changing anything.

At Herd, we’re on a mission to help Government departments, arms length bodies, local authorities, and higher education institutions find effective and credible ways to hit productivity, efficiencies and savings targets. Whether that’s getting new digital ideas and services off-the-ground, helping with the delivery of them, and yep, we love to work with that less sexy stuff too.

Our mission is to help the public sector save 2% in a human-centred, incremental way

We’re uniquely positioned as a team of public sector business analysis and product management experts, to help. We typically follow a 3 stage engagement approach, which centres around three of our core services.

Stage 1: Identify opportunities with our multidisciplinary Exploration Squads. We conduct rapid impact assessments to ensure only feasible, viable, and desirable opportunities are considered and progressed. Preventing overwhelming backlogs, and helping to accelerate the best ideas.

Stage 2: Build credible baselines: You need good estimates and real measurements from people who do the work to get reliable baselines. There’s no avoiding this effort. You need to understand how the process works in reality, not just on paper. What makes a difference is the way we go about gathering this information, engaging the people involved, and what we do with that data next. We use best-in-breed tools to model the data inside processes. This lets us model improvements, plan scenarios and pull out insights with a few clicks.

Stage 3: Either progress those opportunities into Discovery with our Discovery-as-a-Service, or help to develop compelling narrative rich, to-the-point business cases. We do this by sticking to a core principle that a good business case is, at core, a compelling story. We work with you to understand the context, the people involved, the work done so far. Then, we identify the ‘golden thread’ of narrative that runs through it all: the fundamental ‘ask’, the reasons why change is required and the benefits the readers and the wider organisation will see if the change happens.

How can you work with Herd?

It’s easier than ever to work with us, as we’re now on the new G-Cloud 14 which is “direct award” only, saving time on lengthy, time-consuming tender processes. Another win for efficiency!

You can also engage us through numerous other CCS and non-CCS frameworks.

• Artificial Intelligence RM6200 via Crown Commercial DPA – Herd page 
• Automation Marketplace RM6173
• Bloom Pro-vide 2.0/ NEPRO3
• Cyber Security Services 3 RM3764.3
• London Borough of Waltham Forest: Dynamic Purchasing System for the provision of Specialist Professional Services
• Low Value Purchase System RM6237
• Ministry of Defence Connectivity of Disparate Remote Autonomous Systems (CODRAS) Re-opening No.2
• National Nuclear Lab – Project Delivery DPS
• Ofgem Digital Services DPS – 2020-043
• Public Contracts Scotland
• Quality Assurance and Systems Testing for IT Systems 2 RM6148

Fancy a natter about what you’re working on? We’d love to find out more and explore how we can help. Ping us a message over LinkedIn or get in touch.

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🖊️ Authored by: Jamie Toyne, Founder & CEO at Herd Consulting

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