Michelle Williams is a DWP veteran in the truest sense of the word.
The Head of IT Asset Management for the department has been working for DWP since she was 17 years old, starting out in operations processing carers allowances, before moving to a job centre, then finally to corporate.
However, her career has not been without its challenges. Most notably, when she took on leadership of the asset management team, she was faced with the task of tackling persistent overspending.
Williams says that it was in part by reflecting on her experience of frontline DWP work that she was able to mitigate these issues alongside her team, saving in excess of £50 million and contributing to the community in the process.
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When Williams first took over the DWP asset management team, the unit’s work consisted largely of automatically renewing the department’s software and hardware every year, she recounted.
“That's a strategy, you can do that, but you have a lot of risk and you're probably wasting a lot of value as well”, she said.
“The risk around it might be that we aren't buying enough and that we could end up in court for that, we could have reputational damage, we could have massive fees or we could be deploying it in places that we shouldn't be, using it against the terms and conditions”.
As a result, Williams decided that transformation was needed. This transformation would be focused on three key areas, she explained: people, processes and technology.
In terms of people, a transformation in the unit’s hiring practices was necessary to ensure that employees had the appropriate diligence and skillset to succeed in the role.
The original recruitment strategy for the unit involved hiring those with previous experience of asset management in the corporate world. However, this led to a problem as low civil service wages meant that many of those making the transition from the private sector into civil service were those who were underperforming.
The solution to this, for Williams, was to look back to her roots.
She said: “Looking at my own background, I knew that work ethic was what we needed and that we could get that from our frontline operations.
“So we did a lot of work with our operational areas, where people process benefits in the job centres, looking for people with some digital knowledge that we could bring over that had a strong work ethic. Around 90% of my team now are people from frontline DWP”.
The unit has now launched an apprenticeship scheme, in collaboration with asset management consultancy group ITSX, which allows them to recruit young people straight from school, meaning they have a steady stream of pre-trained, inbound staff members.
In addition to this, a change in processes was also necessary to ensure that the asset management team was maximising value and minimising risks, Williams said. She decided that DWP should take a more critical approach to technology procurement, moving from a reactive strategy of renewing technology every year to the more proactive approach of ensuring that the technology used was truly the best value the department could get.
This involved asking questions along the lines of “are we buying too much?”, “are we using everything [certain technology] has to offer?”, “do we buy too many different things?”.
To answer this question, DWP looked at its tooling. It used this to analyse its digital estate, enabling it to develop a fuller picture of whether or where the department is at risk, or using technology inefficiently or inappropriately. Similarly, the keeping of significantly more detailed data means that the team is able to support long-term planning, passing important information onto senior leaders.
Furthermore, the team is also much more aware of, and proactive around, the dangers of getting “locked in” to older technology, which has historically led to vendors, having the upper hand, feeling able to significantly increase their prices. DWP has now begun to mitigate for that, and put exit plans in place.
All of these changes have led to meaningful savings within the department. In the case of one vendor, DWP has decreased their annual spend from £5 million to £3 million. And this is just one example - the department is getting better value from all of their roughly 300 publishers.
Williams believes that one of the biggest lessons other departments seeking to improve efficiency and lower expenditure could learn from her example would be the importance of building upon good foundations.
She said: “The stuff that we've done has taken about five years and the question that I always get asked from other departments is ‘well, how can I do that quicker?’ ‘How can I achieve that in a year?’ And I suppose my advice is that you can't.”
Organisations can begin to make savings early, but for a change to be impactful in the long-term, a long-term vision is needed, Williams argues. This involves convincing senior leaders of the business case for such a change - something which can be easier said than done.
However, while savings are necessary, for Williams the most rewarding part of the project was seeing the benefit an apprenticeship scheme had on young people.
She said: “The biggest success we have is our people strategy - apprentices.
“I love bringing young people on board and giving them a career, and seeing them build that and an expertise, and them having the ability to demonstrate value and the feel good factor of they've saved money.
“So the people aspect is the best bit by a long way”.