The Assistant Director of Customers, Policy and Improvement, Sophie Ellis, introduced the report, highlighting the aspects of the customer contact programme that had gone well, those that had gone less well and what lessons had been learned and steps taken to ensure that the learning is shared.

Discussion with the task group explored the balance between using internal staff with a stake in the long term future of the project and bringing in external experts; the extent to which the project was an ambitious one that sought to have a single user log-in (compared to the multiple interfaces that other councils have); the balance between agility and cost particularly in relation to having one large contract compared to several smaller ones and the use of break clauses. The importance of effective change management was also discussed and how the extent to which this was needed could never be underestimated. Sophie Ellis confirmed that this was being considered and resources applied to other projects and programmes.

Sophie Ellis reassured the task group that, even though there was always scope for further user involvement, there had been large scale customer insight work at the start of the programme that had created customer profiles that were used to inform the programme at key stages.

The Director of Corporate Services, Caroline Holland, reminded members that the programme had a long history and that councillors had been critical of a lack of ambition in an earlier proposal for a “CRM lite” approach. She said officers had taken that on board in the subsequent customer contact strategy and associated website development. In response to a question about whether officers and councillors had been over-ambitious, both Caroline Holland and Sophie Ellis said that Merton’s aspiration to be London’s Best Council demonstrated that the council’s ethos is to be ambitious and that it hadn’t been over ambitious in this instance.

Task group members said that a number of the lessons learned were already known from the experience of other large scale public sector projects. Sophie Ellis said that the council had been mindful of that wider experience and had taken steps to address this. For example, although external expertise had been used, including a specialist contract lawyer, the programme had still encountered difficulties and lessons learned required future programmes to focus on how to manage difficulties as they arise and how to achieve the best balance between outcomes and cost. Caroline Holland added that, although a number of new systems have been subsequently introduced, this was the first major new IT system for many years and so one of the learning points was to look at how to help staff to get involved in shaping change as well as adapting to it.

In response to questions about the monitoring and enforcement of the contract, Caroline Holland said that  those aspects had been successful and enabled a good proportion of the outcomes to be delivered despite the staffing and other issues experienced by the contractor which have previously been reported to the Overview and Scrutiny Commission. In a private session at the end of the meeting, Sophie Ellis explained what the mediation process had been, how this had worked in practice and what outcomes had been achieved.

Caroline Holland said that a number of the learning points had already been actioned, including making contact with other councils using the same provider in order to share experiences and exert leverage when required.

In response to questions about recruitment, Caroline Holland said that the council was exploring every avenue to recruit staff with specialist IT project management skills but that these staff were in short supply.

In response to a question about the next steps for the customer contact programme, Sophie Ellis said that further developments would be actioned once the council had moved to Office 365 (which will happen shortly) and that there were some other incremental changes being implemented through a number of providers. One recent improvement is that residents can now report street issues such as fly tips without being required to provide a name and address. Sophie Ellis agreed that further communication to residents would be helpful and that she would consider other ways in which users could input, for example through a user forum. She stressed that the council continued to learn through its analysis of complaints and other user feedback.