Please help - financial strategy got to save £1M

[RosieLeaLovesTea]

Ok help. Any strategic leaders
who are also fantastic mums
and dads!

I need to write a financial strategy -
public sector- to save £1m
public sector and budgets are stretched!

shit. Please help any ideas and send wine!

Rachel? Is that you?

I do this kind of thing.

How big is the budget and what kind of stuff makes it up? What kind of service is it?

Obviously easier to save £1m if it’s a £100m budget than if it’s a £2m budget!

What timescales do you have to achieve the saving in? I presume the savings have to be recurrent revenue savings?

First things I’d look for are:

• Any expenditure items that naturally won’t be occurring next year
• Anyone in the team you know is going to be leaving.

There’s aren’t many options really - reduce staff , increase income if there is any areas that you trade or look at contract/Commissioning to see if any savings or reduce demand so you minimise any external spend. I’m public sector and have shaved my budgets by similar amounts - nothing left to go anymore but still need to save more:( it’s relentless. Good luck!

I really really hope this is either a spoof or someone’s school project

Hire a really good procurement person and reduce 3rd party costs

Check the obvious things:

• Travel and entertainment budgets: can they be centralised and managed centrally with a firm policy? No more trips for conferences signed off by line managers etc.
• Recruiting fees: ditto
• Process for recruitment: new policy that requires department head sign off even to replace existing roles.

If that isn’t enough:

• Reduce contract staff and consultants by 25%
• Figure out what each department does for their core role - makes widgets, does accounts, writes code, teaches - and consider removing X% of the rest.

Get rid of 10 contract staff (or about 3 consultants.)
Job done.

Stop management getting all their multiple, daily meetings for the sake of meetings being catered with tea/coffee/biscuits. Stop the catered lunches.
Reduce 'civic hospitality' which is basically self congratulatory managers faffing about!

None of that still happens in the public sector!

@RosieLeaLovesTea
I need your complete accounts, a breakdown of staffing outputs and a consultant fee of £250000.

If the OP is genuine, then I think we can all agree the peter principle is alive and well.

1. Anyone who uses a computer is sent on a training course to improve their skills. Whether it's typing or actually using software.
2. Find the middle management waster who is not missed when they're off.
3. Review each job for process details
4. Buy good biscuits.
5. Review what work is done outside of key hours and how many staff sit and do nothing after 4pm.
6. Review all purchases especially those repeat purchases which can be bought more cost effectively.
7. Ask everyone to detail one thing that would make them more efficient. Action the ones that are practical.
8. Look at how much time people spend walking around pointlessly and rearrange desks so they will find it involves walking past a senior member of staff.

Change the toilet roll from triple ply to single.

Surely this is a joke.

It does from what I've recently observed!!
A lunch time 'meet and greet' with senior management.. told "you're welcome to bring your lunch" went along to see the catering trolley trundle along with all the plated up sandwiches/rolls/scones and coffee/tea flasks, parked up by the area for management. They didn't even provide water for the rest of the staff! 😆 and then tried to do the 'hey guys, hail fellow well met, totally down with you frontline folk!'

There will always be dead wood middle managers that are flying under the radar. Seek them out and let them go

And you’re crowdsourcing from mumsnet? Yeah, okay. I wonder is there is a skill mismatch issue at your org.

Wow. This is how decisions are made that affect us and our families lives deeply, on a Friday night on the back of a fag packet, with wine. That said, the collective wisdom of a group of MNers may be an improvement on local authority groupthink.

End counterproductive practices that are claimed to save money and increase efficiency but generally achieve the opposite.

We have to book all our (essential for a commercial service) travel via an external travel agent that works out far more expensive and time consuming than booking direct/via booking.com etc. Staff to pay and reclaim or use the company credit card that exists but no-one is allowed to use.

In departments where you have constant staff churn because pay is lower than competitors, increase salaries so people stay and you're not in an endless cycle of recruiting and training only for people to leave when they get a bit of experience but before the time invested in them pays off.

Get rid of staff who are dead wood. I'd start looking at those members of staff who when given a task are so clueless they have to seek a solution on a public internet forum.

Sell buildings and lease cheap office space out of town with parking. Allow WFH 50%

ditch your traditional IT principles and go with cloud SASE or SSE. Save a fortune and reduce cyber risk.

I'm not joking. Have you tried asking ChatGPT?

Resign? If that’s your job and you’re canvassing mums net that’s a bit concerning?

im senior management and my division has to save 3% of our budget which is about 9mil. My contribution from my areas is about 2mil. 98% of my budget is pay. It’s going to be some pretty uncomfortable convos and discussions about what we stop doing!

Stop providing lunches for meetings and training.

Remove any printed material - posters etc for internal things and use the intranet for notices etc

Have a look through the expenses claims system and see who is expensing the most and what they're expensing for. I can guarantee that people will be taking the piss. Chewing gum, three or four costas a day, breakfast, lunch and a microwave meal as they're going to get home late is not ok and I know that I have put more than one menager's expenses through with these on them regularly. Tighten up the rules and challenge.

They're public sector. They already won't have any of that save for possibly some lunches during training events.

Expenses are only paid when working away from base and barely cover one Costa a day let alone lunch or any of the rest.