Delivery Following the approval of the services’ Strategic Outline Case (SOC) by HM Treasury, the project team embarked on a series of market engagement events with potential suppliers. This, coupled with supply chain issues arising from the COVID pandemic, resulted in the need to rapidly change the team’s procurement approach. Working collaboratively as part of the ESR team and having reviewed the SOC and clarified the revised approach we managed the co-production of the OBC by:

• Updating the SOC’s strategic case to reflect the change of direction and clarify the potential impact of the COVID pandemic on future activities.

• Working with ESR subject matter exerts to produce a fully updated and more detailed economic case that:

  • Adopted the options framework for the identification of longlist solutions.

  • Included a comprehensive shortlisting process that resulted in the down selection of 3 options.

  • Identified a preferred option following a detailed investment appraisal based on cost, quantified/non-quantified benefits and quantified/non-quantified risks.

  • Applied optimism bias to elements of the preferred option that was appropriate for this stage of the procurement lifecycle.

• Summarising the budgetary impact of the preferred option in a financial case that provided clarity on both existing and required funding levels.

• Working with our client’s commercial lead to deliver a comprehensive commercial case, based on latest guidance, that provided stakeholders with reassurance in respect to how future procurement activity would be undertaken.

• Collaborating with the project team to document both the ESR Procurement Project’s and the future ESR service’s governance and delivery arrangements in a robust management case.

• Supplementing the above content with a series of detailed Appendices providing low level information to support stakeholder’s review of the OBC.

• Supporting the internal, departmental and HM Treasury’s approval of the case by either making minor updates to its content or providing clarification to queries as required.

Result Our experience in producing major business cases coupled with the client team’s ESR domain expertise enabled the production of the OBC within only 7 weeks. The approval process was commenced at this point and the OBC duly received full approval from HM Treasury. The project team have subsequently enacted the revised approach securing the ongoing delivery of the ESR service whilst in parallel investigating how future service provision should be undertaken.