Head of Property – Interim Support

Project Summary

Norse Consulting was contracted to provide a Senior Director to act as Interim Head of Property Services at Cambridgeshire County Council and an SRO for the SPOKES programme of work

The role of the Interim Head of Property Services was to oversee and pull together a dysfunctional team; to work with them to rebuild their reputation and to ensure cohesion and efficiency.

Initial team building and cross functional working was required to ensure the three property services – Estates and Asset Management, Facilities Management, and Compliance Services – were working as a consolidated team and not operating in silos.

Considerable effort was required to break down barriers and facilitate a more effective and efficient operating model that had the buy-in from the existing team.

Concurrently, a communications offensive was launched to reach out to stakeholders and members to re-establish the services required and expectations, while outlining how the services should work and how best to engage with those services for improved outputs.

Integral to the success of the work was to review and consolidate the data held on the estate, with the aim of ensuring consistency and sharing knowledge on properties. The objective was to achieve a considered capital programme, giving greater value for money and economies of scale through procurement.

Finally, keeping a close watch on all these areas, the Interim Head of Property Services was to ensure the service continued to deliver high quality outputs, with no reduction in standards, and to oversee planning for continued service improvements.

The second part was to provide the provision of an SRO to oversee the SPOKES Programme, which aimed to relocate staff from Shire Hall in Cambridge to a number of sites across the county.

This was a complex programme involving 19 individual building projects. It also saw the provision of additional services, including planning consultancy to advise the client; the submission and management of planning applications and the project management of a number of construction projects through their redevelopment phases, covering all RIBA stages and procurement.

The role was largely to monitor and track budgets and ensure that appropriate governance was in place to capture and record strategic decisions required as the projects developed.

It also included regular briefings to members and working closely with portfolio holders, as well as reporting monthly to the Strategic Programme Board, and close contact with finance colleagues to track and monitor spend against budgets.

Also required was the introduction of specialists to support deficiencies on the client-side team in respect to planning support and client-side project management.

It was essential to ensure individual projects had the competence to deliver the works on time and budget, and to work closely with building contractors to maximise the project benefits.

Integral to these commissions is a strong working knowledge of practices in other local authorities and how the best practice from that exposure can support the work being delivered, giving members and senior officers confidence in the transformational journey.