BEIS Shared Services Transition Assurance

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy was created in 2016 following the integration of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Both Departments had contracted with external shared service providers for the delivery of HR, Finance and Procurement services.

The new Department has continued with these arrangements but the operational inefficiency of using two systems cannot continue.

We have a project in place to deliver the transfer of around 1500 staff records plus associated finance and procurement arrangements so that the Department is operating on a single service.

We recognise that such a transfer carries significant risk and we are therefore seeking external expertise to advise us on our current proposals, including: • The nature of the technical challenge (is the data sufficiently robust for transfer, what remedial actions will need to be undertaken, what is involved in the detail of the transfer from one system to the other). • The resources we will require to affect the transfer (in terms of resources at our shared services providers, our internal functional teams and user time). • The timelines we should be planning for, to deliver the project. • The nature of the Business Change challenge and the best plan for communicating with and managing our stakeholders and End-users and training our End-users to implement the Business Change. • The costs and benefits of migrating all our users onto a completely new service (rather than the interim solution of moving all users to one of our current services), including an assessment of what work the business would need to undertake to move to a completely new service.

The project will take place in January/February 2018.

The initial phase will be a review of systems and current plans, intended to highlight the broad challenges and any further detailed work that might be required to fully scope the transfer from one provider to the other.

Subsequent phases will therefore be dependent upon outcomes from this initial work identifying where further work should focus on, within the framework set out below.