A company specialised in advising on transformation of business software has been awarded a contract to support DWP, Home Office, MoJ and Defra in the final weeks of common design

The £2.5bn Synergy shared services programme has retained consultants to support the completion of the key “common design” phase mapping out how unified software platforms will be deployed across four of government’s biggest departments.

The Department for Work and Pensions – which leads work on Synergy, which also encompasses the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – last month entered into a five-month deal with Veran Performance. The agreement is valued at a little under £4m.

The London-based supplier, which specialists in HR and finance transformation, is an existing supplier to Synergy – as well as some of the other clusters of departmental groupings currently deploying shared services.

Over the coming weeks, the focus of the DWP-led collective will be finalising the design phase, in which definitive plans for the new common back-office software will be drawn up.

“The Synergy Programme is at the mid-point in its work to agree a common design for the new ERP,” a newly published commercial notice said. “It now requires design support and assurance to complete the common design phase, prepare for local design and deliver end to end designs. This includes: implementing the agreed consistent, comprehensive approach to design with a bias to action and proactive business engagement that brings together technology and process design and delivers the functional ambitions for transformation; creating and agreeing the end-to-end process maps that include functional review and sign-off and a feedback loop to teams working on the BPS (business process services) tender; clarifying and communicating the final common design, including roles and responsibilities of the Shared Services Hub, functions, common components, departments, and ALBs.”

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The contract between the DWP and Veran can be extended for a further five-month term, which would take the ultimate end date to March 2026. The notice explains that, “if further design support and assurance is required” beyond that, these services can be covered via another procurement process – for a “technical partner” – that is due to wrap up later this year.

Also currently up for grabs is a £9.6m, two-year engagement for a “client-side delivery partner to support the deployment, embedding and operational delivery of the ERP solution and end-to-end business processes” being implemented via the Synergy programme.

The addition of extra external expertise via this series of deals comes shortly after formal assessment documents revealed that Synergy has experienced “early delays” and a reduction in the benefits the programme is forecast to deliver.

The overall delivery cost of the project is currently estimated at about £2.5bn, according to the latest set of departmental major project data. The programme will ultimately deliver shared services to about 250,000 civil services – almost half of government’s overall workforce.