Our recommendations are aimed at helping the OGC and departments obtain better value for money from projects, without increasing departments' overall costs.
a Government has yet to develop an optimal strategy for building, retaining and effectively deploying commercial expertise or raising commercial awareness.
The OGC and departments should evaluate and revise their current commercial skills strategy by October 2010. This should address:
• effective models of commercial leadership;
• raising the commercial awareness of the boards and senior responsible owners;
• key barriers to efficiently deploying commercial expertise;
• departments' reservations about participating in the OGC initiatives; and
• unnecessary duplication between the OGC and departmental initiatives.
b The government does not have the necessary information or mechanism to place people with commercial experience and skills onto the complex projects where and when they are most needed.
Departments should by the end of July 2010:
• put in place project assurance processes that will identify commercial skills gaps in individual project teams; and
• produce an analysis of the commercial skills required across their future complex project procurements, and identify the contract management skills that are required to prevent value for money being eroded during the delivery phase of complex projects.
• The OGC and departments should by October 2010:
• use these plans to establish an optimal cross-government commercial staff plan; and
• work together to make it possible for commercial staff to be seconded quickly between departments, addressing barriers preventing this. The OGC should act as a broker of such secondments where they are in both the government's and the individual's best interests.
c Commercially experienced staff can provide valuable short term interventions at critical times during projects.
As a key part of the cross-government staffing plan, the OGC should explore how to establish a cadre of experts that can be deployed if a project runs into difficulty. Currently options include:
• the coordination of central resources of commercial experts from the OGC, Partnerships UK, HM Treasury, and the Shareholder Executive;
• the identification of mechanisms for the short term release of commercially experienced individuals from other departments; and
• the use of quality assured individual consultants.
d Public spending constraints have affected the recruitment of commercial staff. Where opportunities for recruitment do arise, however, government departments should be flexible in how they recruit high calibre staff.
Departments should:
• Ensure adequate budgetary provision for individuals who have the commercial skills to support complex project teams. Departments should be flexible in determining the number, calibre and pay of the commercial staff needed to ensure successful project delivery.
The OGC should:
• Set out guidance on the factors to consider in the recruitment of, and remuneration for, appropriately skilled commercial staff.
e Commercial experience is being lost to projects due to commercial civil servants moving position frequently. The retention of commercial expertise within government departments should be given higher priority.
Departments should:
• produce strategies which set out how they intend to develop, retain and fully utilise commercial staff in critical posts on projects. These strategies should be produced in line with the recommendations set out in the OGC's Building the Procurement profession in the Future. The strategies also need to investigate other options for improving the retention of commercial staff, such as allowing project staff to be promoted in their current post.
f Given the scarce commercial staffing resources in government departments, project teams need tools which will help them to address commercial issues and reduce the risk of poor commercial decisions.
The OGC and departments should:
• Establish a comprehensive set of best commercial practice and standard approaches to be applied across government wherever appropriate. Its adoption should be supported with guidance, training events, and access to experts. This work should draw on the contractual standards already developed for private finance projects, information communication technology, and construction.
• The OGC and departments should further develop information sharing on:
• learning and development opportunities; and
• individuals' experiences of interacting with different private sector companies.
gPCRs continue to be a useful indicator of the commercial skills of departments. But the OGC does not have an adequate ongoing performance management system to measure the success of its individual initiatives.
The OGC should:
• collect data from commercial directors, to assess the impact of OGC's commercial skills initiatives against their objectives. This could include tracking the impact that initiatives have had on the future retention of commercial staff, their career progression, and confidence in dealing with commercial challenges; and
• establish by October 2010 a performance measurement framework, with key performance indicators for commercial skills capability across government. The OGC should coordinate the collection of relevant data from departments and make use of existing sources such as the Government Procurement Service (GPS) annual survey and PCRs.