Background

The London Borough of Sutton is one of the most southerly boroughs in London and serves a population of just under 200,000 residents.  The council has a long standing Liberal Democrat administration which has set a range of improvement goals based on four overarching themes – safer, fairer, greener and smarter.

Like many councils across the UK, Sutton needed to reduce its operating budget by around 25% (£30m) within a very short timescale.  Rather than cut back on existing services, Sutton decided to review the way it provided all services in order to find smarter ways of doing it - and therefore supporting one of the four core themes.  Thus the Smarter Services Sutton programme was borne. 

The Challenges

The scale of the savings needed meant that there would be an unprecedented number of efficiency reviews to conduct, and most importantly a significant number of Business Cases to review, prioritise and approve.  Sutton they needed a programme approach that optimized the number and sequence of reviews and a governance structure that could delegate some decisions.

As the primary goal was to ensure a balanced budget Sutton needed to be sure that efficiency savings promised in each Business Case could be and would be achieved and that savings were not being double counted. Gerald Almeroth, the Strategic Director of Resources, explained “I wanted to be sure that each Business Case was calculating the savings in the same way and that there was no duplication across the projects.  Additionally, I wanted to know how certain the savings would be and what actions were planned to make sure they would be realised.”

Furthermore, one of the issues facing Sutton was the dilemma of not wanting to rush in to making arbitrary cuts, but the timescale required urgent action.  Therefore they needed a programme management approach that would distinguish between urgent and important decisions. 

Support from EPPM

Sutton was one of the core councils that contributed to the development of the Public Sector Programme Management Approach (PSPMA) as part of the pan-London Excellence in Programme and Project Management (EPPM) initiative. 

One element of EPPM was to provide facilitated workshops, led by programme management experts, to help organisations using PSPMA to define an aspect of their programme. 

Andy Murray, from Outperform, was appointed to facilitate a workshop to help define the programme plan for Sutton’s Smarter Services Sutton Programme.

The workshop participants included the programme manager, the programme director, the chair of the programme board and other members of the programme board.

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