Consulting giant’s deal will provide two years of support for shared services cluster that also includes Home Office, Ministry of Justice and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

KPMG has been awarded an £8m contract to provide support for the Department for Work and Pensions’ £2.5bn Synergy shared-services programme.

Under the contract, which runs until 2 October 2027, KPMG will “support the deployment, embedding and operational delivery” of the Synergy programme’s enterprise resource planning system.

According to the award notice, KPMG will be “expected to deliver outcomes against five separate categories: programme delivery; implementation; business change; readiness assessment (including learning and training); and Synergy Shared Services Hub (SSSH) enablement”.

Led by DWP, the Synergy programme will unite the department, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on a centralised and cloud-based back-office software infrastructure based on Oracle products, with implementation provided by IBM. The two tech giants were last year awarded long-term deals worth £850m.

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Earlier this year, it emerged that the scheme – which is part of the Government Major Projects Portfolio – has experienced “early delays” and a reduction in the level of forecast benefits.

The programme, which is expected to complete its delivery schedule in around three years’ time, will ultimately support the work of around 250,000 civil servants – just under half of government’s entire headcount.

Synergy is intended to support delivery-focused departments as part of the government’s shared-services drive. Four other projects are developing shared services for different departmental clusters.

Matrix will provide back-office services for a policy-focused cluster of nine departments; the Defence grouping will support the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces; the Overseas cluster largely comprises the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office; finally, the HM Revenue and Customs-led Unity cluster will support that department, the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.