Our client, the Ministry of Justice, delivers courts, tribunals, prison, probation and judicial support services for the UK Government. They are accountable for a budget of over £8bn. Many of their services are delivered by specialist providers commissioned on a competitive contract basis. In 2019 a new framework contract was let in consultation with the Skills Funding Agency to provide education and skills development into prisons.
PRIORITIES
As a trusted supplier, we were asked to develop a solution to address the MOJ commercial team challenges as follows:
- Multiple suppliers were needed to deliver the service requiring considerable contract management effort
- There were large numbers of new metrics, KPIs and standards to be tracked and managed to underpin policy outcomes namely, enrolments, achievements, success rates and progression
- Individual prisons controlled the call-off and provision environment but did not have adequate contract management systems, resource or processes to do so
OUTCOMES REQUIRED
- The ability to handle large volumes of contract management parameters
- To track and verify provision of service to an individual prisoner and delivery site level to prove that services paid for were those commissioned and delivered and that policy aspirations were being met
- Eliminate re-keying of contract metrics between providers and contract managers to improve accuracy of information and efficiency of process
- To be able to easily add new providers and to compare provider performance
- To have real-time management information reporting in order to respond to questions from internal and external scrutineers and to manage providers
OUR SOLUTION
Using our COMPLY solution, we designed a contract management framework that operates both supplier side and client side. Suppliers derive value from having access to the system to load schedules, verify and store their outcome metrics and track KPIs in real time. The prisons and the MOJ can see what is being delivered at a granular or site level against the contract performance requirements. We designed the system to be fully configurable to respond to changes in requirements and in providers. A contract management reporting suite ensures that exceptions and non-compliance is immediately highlighted.
THE TECHNOLOGY
The service is deployed on an approved public cloud platform to deliver the Software as a Service (SaaS). Our core product design allowed us to configure appropriate security, authentication and content upload enabling external providers to directly access the service whilst still meeting the stringent security requirements of the client.
OUTCOMES ACHIEVED
We mobilised the service in 6 weeks in late 2019. The 4 contracted framework suppliers are using the system to manage their day-to-day input of data. The MOJ and the individual prisons have dashboards that clearly show how suppliers are performing. The system now supports 1600 contract, performance and operational managers in prisons and suppliers; 70,000 end users and 75,000 attendances on courses have been logged. COMPLY has also been used to track learning and disability assessments (LDD), autism screening and has enabled local management to drive successful completion of courses and interventions to 70%. Our client can now track progress against published policy and manage its' providers with minimal additional resource.