Press Release

From: Professor John Seddon’s Office, Vanguard Consulting, Buckingham.

Blaming customers and doing it faster will not halt shared services losses

The UK’s leading service design expert and 7- year critic of shared services, Professor John Seddon, reacts to today’s NAO revelation that Whitehall shared service projects have overspent by £500m.

“According to today’s report, the £500m shared services overspend came about despite significant cost and effort. This does not surprise me. Throwing money at something and trying hard does not make up for flawed logic. What does surprise me is that the Cabinet Office is now planning to do the more of the same. Their response is more significant cost and effort. Instead of understanding the real causes for failure and abandoning costly shared services projects, they are blaming the customer for not being intelligent enough. They have even resolved to speed up implementation. In effect, they are planning to do the wrong thing faster.

The real cause of failure is the very concept of shared services. These vast, shared back office service factories are based on mass production logic. This logic is the problem, not the solution. The design hides waste and guarantees a high cost and poor, inflexible service. Shared service factories cause a disruption in the flow of work, create waste in handoffs, rework and duplication, lengthening the time it takes to deliver a service and consequently creating failure demand . This is demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer. What really matters is the cost of service end to end, from the customer point of view. Cost is in flow, not scale”.

John Seddon wrote an open letter to Ruth Kelly the then Minister for Communities and Local Government in May 2006 to warn against shared service projects. 

John Seddon

Contact John’s PR

Charlotte Pell