Lessons for
21st-century
shared services

By now, there have been enough implementations – both successful and not – to learn how shared services can work best in the public sector. Consider these lessons to make your future adoption or expansion of shared services successful.

1. Choose the right services to share

Many benefits come from standardization, including more efficient processes and less manual entry.

Most organizations choose to start with simpler back-office functions before moving on to customer-facing sections. Make sure there are no fundamental barriers in terms of processes or regulations preventing you from sharing a common service with your partner organizations.

Identify the technologies and components needed and what interoperability they have. The core value of a shared service is streamlining processes and data, reducing duplicate entry, and creating end-to-end workflows, so the systems you use need – at a minimum – to talk to each other and ideally fully interact.

2. Take a clear look at the numbers

Cost savings are critical in a time of painful austerity measures and the pressures for increased efficiency.

Understanding the likely return on investment (ROI) using principles such as Activity Based Costing does not cover all the value modern shared services deliver. Using comparable service levels and ensuring that you quantify less-tangible benefits such as cost of savings due to time saved in transaction processing, quality of data, and ease of reporting and employee engagement.

Sharing services or cross-organization teams can be challenging for everyone, especially employees. It is critical that your organization gets buy-in from senior political and operational leaders when building and enhancing the technology used or processes enhanced across the service.

Most organizations need to recognize the effort and achievements of enhancements across the shared service – especially after the bumpy road of implementation. Make sure you have a before-and-after review, share findings, reward initiatives, and applaud employees for their great work in building the service.

3. Simplifying the governance model

Transparency compels individuals and teams to be accountable,
speeds decision-making, and ultimately helps reach deadlines on time.
With one version of the truth and access to all information via a solution that facilitates collaborations, it ensures both compliance with regulation and internal governance standards.

Essential in the efforts to encourage governance is a virtual common workspace for all stakeholders to guide the flow of work and ideas to the right person at the right time. This can harness everyone’s energy and expose bottlenecks before they become problematic.

4. Don’t underestimate the
planning cycle, and then…
plan some more

Planning correctly sets the foundation for the future, especially when working across organizations, departments, and administrative regions. Get your resourcing right before the project starts: You will need full-time, dedicated, experienced professionals from business operations and technology partners to contribute different skills at different times.

Relationships and understandings you establish during this planning process will be critical to overcome future challenges.

5. Focus on keeping it simple

Things can start to look complex from the outset – establish a standard model, mandate it where possible, and only localize it where necessary without losing out on agility. Make sure that the strategy is focused on the scope in question and isn’t too far-reaching. Set tangible, measurable goals that are realistic and achievable before taking on more complex challenges. Run the model for an agreed period before adjusting to rule out the negative effects of the change factor.

6. Choose the right technology partner

Remember that you’re not just choosing a technology but a transformation partner; even in established shared services, the progression of your digitalization project needs the right solution partner. Your technology service provider will be your partner who sees you through a complex transition, both in terms of technology and people skills. Choose one that has the technical expertise, accepts and embraces your vision, and is committed to seeing you through this process. Choose technology that is flexible enough to keep pace with new post-implementation demands quickly, enables agility and transparency across the environment, and is cost-effective with minimum disruption to customers.

7. Keeping everyone on board

Some of the most expensive shared-service disasters stem from a lack of buy-in or customers. Change must be carefully and sensitively managed, but users should not doubt that the new way of working will be the new way of working – by mandate if incentives and voluntary action are insufficient. Everyone has learned to work differently in recent months; remote working and SaaS have seen a revolution in their adoption. Don’t be afraid of mandating change, but do back it up with evidence.

The most successful shared services organizations in the public sector have proven that if you can demonstrate efficiencies and cost savings, organizations will come to you rather than being pushed. This is where positive and committed foundation customers, beacons, are invaluable in ensuring an SSC’s success.

8. Strong leadership is the key
to successfully transforming
shared services

Most failed transformation programs have a common theme – a lack of leadership through the implementation and beyond. Leadership needs to be credible and visible. It must also rise above any organization’s needs and look at the bigger picture. Without this leadership, personal agendas will surface and undermine the ability to drive new, standardized processes with enhanced technology.

Although all of these lessons may not seem directly relevant to merging organizations, they are critical for any major change programs when merging services together.