Improving services

Two reports in the Welsh Government independently identified the need for a Centre of Excellence to support professionals across Wales to deliver key priorities set out by the Future Generations Act.

The key to this was supporting professionals and the wider community to understand how to deploy policy in their day-to-day activity

Our challenge was to run a Discovery process with users across a series of stakeholder groups in, and outside of, the Welsh Government to validate a) if a Centre of Excellence is needed and b) what the needs of users of a Centre of Excellence are.

We led the Discovery end-to-end in partnership with a small team from the Welsh Public Body. We ran the Discovery over 10 week period interviewing c.125 stakeholders from across the profession, their customers, wider stakeholders and suppliers to Wales. 

Part of the work also involved us using our collective networks (ours and the clients) to engage with other relevant Centres of Excellence to feed in learnings to the process of what has worked, what has not and where potential opportunities lie.

The outcome from the Discovery process demonstrated that a Centre of Excellence was required in Wales and that this, critically, should be community led. This has subsequently led to publication of the Discovery findings by the Welsh Government Minister for Finance & Local Government.

The project has since been taken forward into a procurement exercise to design, build and test a series of services identified from the Discovery as an Alpha.

Furthermore, from the project there were some specific digital tooling that required a rapid ‘mini-Alpha’ This included a policy mapping tool to help professionals understand what policies they need to adhere to through their day-to-day activity as well as a pipeline management tool to help users within Welsh Government publish their contract pipelines. Both tools were designed, tested and iterated with users over a 4 week period.