(a)

the council was facing significant financial challenges as its Government funding was being reduced, whilst demand on its key services was increasing and the cost of providing services, such as Adult Social Care was rising; following analysis of the council’s financial position for the next three years it had projected a reduction in spending of £64.5m;

(b)

the council was committed to avoiding large scale cuts in services that would be required in order to deliver savings on this scale and had embarked on an ambitious, large-scale transformation programme, the aim being to reduce costs by fundamentally changing the way services were delivered rather than simply stopping services;

(c)

the savings would be derived from a series of outline business cases from the five transformation programmes -

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Co-operative Centre of Operations (CCO)

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Customer Service Transformation (CST)

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Growth, Asset and Municipal Enterprise (GAME) 

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People and Organisational Development (POD)

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Integrated Health and Wellbeing (IHWB)

(d)

the five transformation programmes planned to deliver £6.5m savings for the council in 2014/15; it would not be possible to deliver this scale of change as part of the council’s day to day business and in addition, the scale and timescales required to implement the changes required skills and planning not previously deployed by the council;

(e)

the Transformation Portfolio Office has run from August 2013 to date; it was established to oversee the change and to transfer new and specialist skills to the rest of the organisation; the total investment for 2014/15 in skills and capacity was £5.3m;

(f)

due to the ambitious scale of the programme, the council commissioned Deloitte to undertake an independent assurance of the transformation scope to assess whether it had been appropriately set up to deliver the programme plans;

(g)

the review had identified a number of strengths and advantages to the council’s approach to transformation, which included –

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strong programme management capacity, capability and tools;

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strong governance arrangements with project and programme boards;

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provided focus and accountability;

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provided expertise and subject matter knowledge;

(h)

a series of overarching recommendations for improvement had also been identified in three areas -

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business cases;

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pace;

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transfer of skills;

(i)

in addition a number of specific recommendations had been identified for each of the transformation programmes;

(j)

a presentation was provided on the transformation capability maturity model and improvement plan, which included -

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the journey so far;

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what is a capability maturity model?

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why develop our capabilities? OGC common causes of programme failure;

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evidence statements;

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the capabilities in the transformation capability maturity model;

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how this model would be used to measure the maturing ability to deliver transformational change;

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what capability maturity would look like by Spring 2015?

(k)

following analysis of the information provided for the assurance report, none of the transformation programmes had been identified as being of concern;

(l)

a plan was currently being drafted which would provide details relating to the key dependencies and inter-dependencies of the transformation programmes; 

(m)

residents would start to see fundamental changes to services with the delivery of the transformation programmes, such as the opening of the 1^st stop shop, integrated health and social care, street services, etc.

(1)

the management actions contained in the report, are referred to the appropriate panels for inclusion in their work programmes;

(2)

it would monitor the overarching recommendations including the step down plan and engagement plan;

(3)

it will monitor the delivery against the planned improvements.