DWP spends £4.2 billion p a on third party goods and services. The Commercial and Estates Directorate provides corporate commercial direction, and directly manages £1.9 billion in spend.

Business Challenges

• To ensure that staff develop the skills and knowledge needed to implement and sustain the new procurement strategies and ways of working
• To challenge teams to adopt consistent use of new tools and techniques in order to identify breakthrough savings opportunities and develop a strategy to realise the savings
• To identify areas for skills development and develop appropriate interventions, in restricted time scales
• To provide the appropriate level of support that enables the DWP to become self-sustaining from a Category Management perspective

Solutions

• To develop a training programme that raises awareness of the required skills and knowledge and enables staff to practice key tools and techniques integral to the development of a category strategy
• To engage with key senior management and category team leaders driving the change management process to interpret their needs and tailor workshop content to match the specific needs of each category team prior to an event taking place
• To adopt a facilitative and challenging approach in a workshop environment to enable all team members to understand and practice the new tools and techniques and to leave armed with key elements of their strategy already under way
• To develop a robust learning evaluation methodology that enables the measurement of return on investment of the training and helps to identify future learning needs

Benefits

• Motivated teams ready to take on the demands of delivering category management
• Appropriately skilled staff able to implement the new procurement strategies and ways of working within the tight timeline
• Improved awareness of the new procurement supporting functions within the organisation
• Improved and more efficient internal communication channels initiated