Highways Agency
Atos Consulting, 2009
Creating a blueprint for financial accountability in Whitehall
Summary
Atos Consulting helped the Highways Agency to improve operational performance while creating unprecedented levels of accountability in government.
The Highways Agency operates and improves England’s strategic road network, managing billions of pounds of public spend a year. By 2007, following a major review commissioned by the Department for Transport, the Highways Agency needed to provide more visibility of its spend and the progress of road projects.
The Agency set itself an aggressive target to demonstrate significantly improved programme management control to the Department for Transport in six months – and deliver £3 million efficiency savings in three years.
Without Atos Consulting the Agency could not have met such complex needs within tight timeframes and to budget. The team successfully changed decades-old behaviours in six months.
The project is an example of how change can work in government when consulting practices and skills are deployed with experience and in partnership with the public sector.
This has delivered financial visibility that is unprecedented in government in terms of the:
- scale of public spend
- detailed levels of reporting
- number of stakeholders, from Whitehall through to individual project managers.
The Highways Agency is already on track to exceed its target savings. The project is also a key enabler to deliver at least 5% savings of total operating budget in the next three years through better management of the supply chain.
As well as helping position the Highways Agency as a world-class delivery organisation, the project has produced a blueprint for reporting in government.
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