Better Administrative and Support Services Frequently Asked Questions

1 What is BASS?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

The Better Administrative and Support Services (BASS) Programme aims to lower the cost and strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of State Sector A&S services across the State Sector. Cabinet approved a four-phase programme in December 2009. At the end of each phase, the programme will report back to Cabinet and seek approval to proceed.

2 What are A&S services?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

Administrative and Support (A&S) services are the functions that support organisations in performing their core functions. For BASS, A&S services include the HR function, the finance function, the procurement function, the information and communications technology function, and the corporate and executive services function.

3 Who is involved in BASS?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

The programme has been commissioned by the Treasury, but is has taken a cross-government approach.  Agencies are involved in a number of ways.
Agencies and their staff are involved in BASS in a number of different ways:

• Baseline measurement - 14 agencies  have volunteered for baseline measurement, which involves providing quantitative and qualitative data for A&S services for the 08/09 year.  These agencies are: Counties Manukau DHB, Department of Internal Affairs, Housing New Zealand, Inland Revenue Department, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry of Social Development, Nelson-Marlborough DHB, NZ Defence Force, NZ Transport Agency, NZ Police, The Treasury, Whanganui DHB.
• Comms and general advice - Representatives from 43 agencies attend briefings and provide general advice to the BASS programme and communicate about BASS within their organisations.  
• Business case development - During Phase Two, 11 agencies  have volunteered to support more detailed data gathering and analysis to support the development of a business case.  The agencies are: Department of Internal Affairs, Housing New Zealand, Inland Revenue Department, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry of Social Development, NZ Defence Force, NZ Transport Agency, NZ Police, The Treasury.
• Specialist functional advice - Functional experts (made up of representatives from across government, not just those agencies that are baselining performance) from each of the five functions provide advice to the BASS Programme to assist in delivering more effective and efficient State-sector A&S services.
• Governance - A cross-agency Steering Committee (made up of representatives from across government, not just those agencies that are baselining performance) providing support and guidance to the BASS Programme to maximise the opportunities for optimising A&S services across government. Members are: Andrew Kibblewhite, Deputy CE, Treasury; Roy Baker, GM, Corporate Services, HNZC; Dr Graeme Benny, GM, Organisational Support, NZDF ; Marc Warner, Director, Value for Money Programme, MSD; Dr Rose O’Neill, Manager State Sector Development, SSC; Sue Gordon, NZ General Manager, Strategic Development & Support, LINZ.

4 How many metrics are there?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

There are 24 metrics in total across the five A&S services functions in scope. The metrics include both measures of efficiency (cost) and effectiveness (quality).

5 How were Phase One measurement agencies chosen?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

The Phase One measurement agencies have volunteered for both Phase One ( benchmarking and target-setting) and for Phase Two (business case development). Which agencies to include in these phases was a topic of discussion when we defined the programme during Phase Zero (programme start up), and the input of a wide range of vendors and subject matter experts was unanimous in the need to focus on larger agencies early in the programme for two reasons:

• Data gathering activity is expensive and time-consuming, and in small agencies a small A&S service team can be swamped by the effort and have little data to share at the end of the exercise. Note that smaller agencies are exempt from A&S service benchmarking activity in the UK for these reasons (in the UK the decision was made that only organisations employing more than 250 FTEs would be included in the scope of the work).
• To anticipate the needs of future phases, the initial set of participating agencies must have sufficient service and transaction volumes to create economies of scale.

Note that MED and Treasury are relatively smaller agencies that have been included not only to take a look at the A&S services in medium / smaller agencies, but also to show willingness to participate in benchmarking exercises that they have initiated.

6 How is BASS aligned with other all-of-government programmes?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

BASS works closely with the MED led Procurement Reform Programme, the DIA led ICT Common Capability Roadmap, the SSC performance improvement initiatives.

7 What is the relationship between BASS and the health Shared Services Organisation?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

BASS is analysing the efficiency and effectiveness of five administrative and support functions across the State sector. The health Shared Services Organisation has been set up to drive faster progress towards national shared services arrangements that will improve the quality and reduce the cost of District Health Board (DHB) administrative and support functions. The BASS programme is an all-of-Government initiative while the DHB shared services work has a specific DHB focus. There are valuable links between the two programmes with three DHBs (representing small, medium and large DHBs) participating in BASS to:

• extend the reach of the BASS programme to DHBs; and
• to provide a link for all DHBs to assess their relative position to international benchmarks.

BASS and the health Shared Services Organisation will continue to work closely to ensure that government has a number of options open to it to reduce cost and improve efficency and effectiveness.

8 What is the relationship between BASS and MED's Procurement Reform programme?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

BASS is analysing the efficiency and effectiveness of five administrative and support functions, one of which is Procurement. While the work of both the BASS programme and MED's Procurement Reform programme share an interest in procurement, the focus of each is different.  BASS has a focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of how we go about purchasing goods and services for the government. MED’s Procurement Reform Programme aims to:

• deliver cost savings through the negotiation of all-of-government contracts in key spend areas (in year one: IT equipment, passenger vehicles and stationery)
• improving access and cut the costs for suppliers doing business with the New Zealand government.
• to investigate the 'strategic' side of procurement activities through, for example, enhancing procurement capability and capacity across the public sector
• improving the governance, oversight and accountability of procurement.  

BASS and the PRP programme will continue to work closely to ensure that government has a number of options open to it to reduce cost and improve efficency and effectiveness.

9 What is the relationship between BASS and DIA's Common ICT Capability programme

Updated 16 Aug 2010

BASS is analysing the efficiency and effectiveness of five administrative and support functions, one of which is ICT. DIA's Common ICT Capability programme is focused on a specific component of the ICT function - investigating and delivering foundation services such as networks, software and ICT infrastructure.

BASS and the Common ICT Capability programmes will continue to work closely to ensure that government has a number of options open to it to reduce cost and improve efficency and effectiveness.

10 What is the relationship between BASS and other performance improvement initiatives such as PIAs and the PIF?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

Performance Improvement Actions (PIAs) and the Performance Improvement Framework (PIF) are seperate initiatives that identify agency-specific actions to improve performance whereas BASS is focused on administrative and support services that agencies have in common to improve performance through collaboration.

The aim of PIAs is to identify the ‘vital few’ practical and innovative actions that department’s will take to really make a difference to performance. They are individually negotiated between respective Minister’s and department chief executives.

The aim of the PIF is to strengthen an agency's current practice by systematically highlighting areas of strengths, areas where performance can be improved, and how improvements can be made.

11 What stage is BASS at?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

Phase One of BASS is underway. In March, Treasury engaged KPMG for benchmarking and specialist technical advice. In April, a team comprised of Treasury, DIA, and MSD staff and the consultants commenced work with fourteen agencies participating in benchmarking. Data analysis is underway and the team will present findings to Cabinet in October. This will include:

• Estimated cost and quality of A&S services across the State Sector (based on an extrapolation of the data collected from the Phase One measurement agencies)
• Indicative goals for the future cost and quality of these services
• Recommended new practices to enhance the scrutiny and transparency of the cost and quality of A&S services
• Recommend a package of quick wins that support the achievement of goals with the intention of implementing these in parallel with Phase Two: business case development.
• A proposal to proceed to the second phase of the programme, which involves developing a business case that evaluates options for meeting goals and recommends a preferred option

12 Why does BASS recommend that agencies don't self-assess their A&S service (cost) and efficiency (quality)?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

Commonality and consistency of data collection is absolutely critical to the integrity of the data. The primary risk of undertaking self assessment independently is that the data collected may not be common or consistent with how data has been collected elsewhere, preventing meaningful comparison.

While we have made the pro-forma widely available, at this stage, we would advise against agency self-assessment, primarily as we cannot guarantee the commonality and consistency of approach to the data collection and validation which provides the high level of necessary data integrity.

During our programme start up phase, stakeholders emphasised the need to provide significant support to agencies during data gathering. The level of support different vendors provide to agencies in their benchmarking methodology was an important feature of the vendor selection process. Now, as we come to the close of the data gathering activity in Phase One, both our vendor and the participating agencies have confirmed what stakeholders suspected - the relatively high level of support agencies are receiving in the KPMG methodology has been a crucial support for data quality (and to meeting our deadlines). Some agencies have been intensively supported during the data collection phase by KPMG. The intention of a “do it right the first time” approach to data gathering is to put resources into supporting high quality data gathering up front rather than putting resources later into intensive data correction exercises when data fails to pass various validation tests.

Ideally, agencies wishing to measure themselves against the metrics in the pro-forma would wait until they can be supported in a future phase of BASS. As part of our Cabinet report back in August, we are recommending ways to improve the transparency and scrutiny applied to the cost and quality of A&S services across the State Sector, likely through ongoing reporting of the metrics with a broader group of agencies. To support the implementation of those new reporting requirements, we anticipate providing a relatively high level of support to agencies gathering data for the first time, and a lower level of support for agencies repeating the exercise.

13 What organisations will the NZ State sector be benchmarked against?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

BASS will be comparing our performance against:

• Similar public sector agencies overseas that has been collected through the Operational Efficiency Programme in the UK.
• A data repository with data provided voluntarily and anonymously to the UK Audit Agencies, by approximately 200 public sector organisations, in-line with the Audit Agencies’ Value for Money indicators. Data collected by organisations by CIPFA and KPMG in the UK.
• Local and State Government database: a subset of Gartner’s total database representing US Local and State Governments.
• Performance data held by the American Productivity & Quality Centre (APQC) covering more than 7,000 public and private sector organisations internationally.
• Performance data held in the Hackett Group database, comprising of approximately 3,000 organisations.
• A database of New Zealand organisations created through local data collection from the 14 agencies who volunteered to provide data to the BASS Programme.

14 What should agencies do if they are considering an investment in the A&S services space?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

As the BASS Programme is taking an evidence-based approach (starting with benchmarking and target setting) it is too early to tell what opportunities may be identified and what initiatives may be recommended and implemented in future phases. However, agencies that intend investing in administrative and support services optimisation initiatives (i.e. in areas such as HR, IT, finance, procurement and corporate and executive services) should consider whether their objectives may be better achieved through a collaborative approach under the BASS Programme. If your agency is considering an investment in A&S services optimisation, we believe there is merit from a public sector wide perspective for you to speak to the BASS programme about how we can work together.

15 How does BASS aim to improve the cost and quality of A&S services?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

The goal will be an all-of-government goal, rather than individual agency targets, and cross-agency collaboration is expected to be key to achieving goals across government. The goal will include two elements of performance: efficiency (cost) and effectiveness (quality). BASS does not have a preferred operating model for A&S services optimisation at this stage. We need to prepare a business case to identifiy solutions for improving cost and quality.

16 When will the business case be complete?

Updated 16 Aug 2010

Planning is underway and we expect to present the timeline and cost to Cabinet in October.