Feature Story

PMO: Total Place Integrator

Executive Director of Jacobs, Chris Wilson highlights the promise that Total Place can bring to public services and how it should be delivered.

Total Place and the associated agenda have created enormous energy and excitement across the public sector, and private and third sector partners. The promise is huge.

At a time of major expenditure reductions, Total Place provides a way of achieving a major re-design of public services around the needs of the customer, implementing new ways of working, re-connecting with communities, bringing together public sector agencies in collaboration to both improve frontline services and achieve cost reductions simultaneously. The new government appears supportive of the agenda and, consistent with the localisation theme, has emphasised that it expects it to be driven forward by councils, local public sector agencies and partners. This should ensure that a further wave of energy is unleashed. The promise is huge but delivering that promise in any locality or region is a major challenge.

Whilst there are many common goals and aspirations across the public sector, and some excellent examples of partnership working, collaboration is not yet the norm. Delivery of Total Place involves the collaboration of multiple organisations, each bringing an institutional history of potentially different goals, cultures, governance, budgets, management structures, programmes and projects.

Many types of council have sought to collaborate, for example, on shared services or back office functions and, whilst some have succeeded, others have found it difficult to reconcile such joint working with the need to maintain their own constitutional independence.

Total Place, or any form of collaboration, is a major change programme. To implement it, it is necessary to put in place proven change management approaches. Foremost amongst these, to deliver the outcomes successfully, is a Programme Management Office (PMO) which is structured and incentivised, usually through a 'pain/gain' share mechanism, to act as an integrator, bringing together and driving forward the multiple programmes.

The PMO sits below the governance and operational management levels, at the day to day programme management level, providing a clear differentiation between the roles of the council cabinet or equivalent, and the management board in discharging their respective scrutiny, strategic oversight and operational management roles, and the role of day to day programme management.
In short, to deliver a programme with the complexity of Total Place requires the type of programme and project controls that are widely used across many public and private sector industries such as defence, nuclear, utilities, pharmaceutical, transportation, telecoms and energy, but have been in short supply in local communities to date because of capacity and funding constraints.

The aim is to proactively manage and incentivise delivery, rather than just monitor the success of programmes. In a tightly controlled cost environment, this means accurately recording committed cost and time, constantly measuring progress against expectation, efficiently re-forecasting future effort, understanding and managing risk to the objectives, and getting an early understanding of potential changes.
It means creating the opportunity to influence the outcomes associated with change and, most importantly, creating a culture that accepts change control as the most important activity in the management process.

By using approaches such as customer expectations surveys, programme team interactive planning, and programme execution plans, the PMO can help translate the Total Place agenda into a deliverable programme that engages all participants fully, ensure the right skills are available at the right time, develops a fully integrated team, and communicates and gains commitment across all parties.
It is only by putting together the promise of Total Place with the delivery mechanisms of the PMO those successful outcomes can be assured.

Chris Wilson
Executive Director
Jacobs

www.jacobs.com