Shared services programme: phase 1 programme closure report

3.0 The delivery phase

The Shared Services Phase 1 programme has been a significant undertaking for the Scottish Government (SG), and the public sector organisations that moved onto the new shared platform with the Scottish Government. This has been a journey of multiple years, with many challenges overcome, and a successful overall launch in 2024 into a live environment.

A rigorous selection exercise concluded that Oracle Fusion Cloud was the best fit for Scottish Government both in terms of functionality and commercially. In addition, the programme selected Sopra Steria as the Client Side Partner and IBM as the Oracle System Integrator in Q1 2022.

The delivery phase of the work can be broken down into three individual years or phases

1. 2022 was about starting up, shaping the programme, building a core team, and making progress with design considerations. Progress was difficult and it became clear that the initial timeline would not be met.

2. 2023 was a year of plan and business case refresh, team strengthening, a change of team structure / approach and significant design and build progress.

3. 2024 was a year of delivery execution, building, system testing, data migrations, user acceptance testing, model office, business change management, cut-over dress rehearsals and ultimately go-live from October 2024.

The programme was organised around key workstreams in a matrix structure, with named leaders for each vertical and horizontal workstream being part of the central programme team. Colleagues from HR, Finance and Purchasing brought ‘business’ expertise into the team, to work in partnership with technical, testing, data migration, system config, project, training and change management professionals to name a few of the skills involved. It took time to shape and build such a team, blending internal capability, with contingent workers and supplier resources.

Our strategy was to design centrally, making use of a framework of process best practices to encourage adoption, rather than adaptation. There were no new customers joining the platform at go-live, thus a central design driven by the Scottish Governments HR, Finance and Purchasing functions was deemed the right approach. This strategy was chosen as the alternative, of gathering individual requirements from every organisation, that would have created additional challenges of sustainability, ease of upgrade, optimisation of data / reporting and shared service growth. The programme made choices throughout about time, cost and quality (of the end solution) on route to go-live. The goal was to find an appropriate balance of features and capabilities, on the best possible timeline for the initial release.

In terms of the timeline:

• our HR Implementation moved from an initial plan of October 2023, to October 2024
• our Finance delivery plan moved from April 2024, to October 2024

We concluded, having looked at multiple options, that ultimately aligning the go-live of HCM and Finance solutions together made most sense. To reduce the risk of this consolidated go-live period we completed very extensive ‘cutover’ preparations, including a ‘dress rehearsal’. Our approach to assessing readiness against a long list of criteria gave us the confidence to commit to go-live in October 2024.

Change Management was a feature of the programme throughout, but a key focus in the 6 months pre go-live. Readying 20,000 users, across multiple professions for a single go-live event was a significant task. Local practices, different levels of pre-existing knowledge, resourcing challenges and competing pressures were all key challenges. We used readiness scorecards to focus teams on key processes. Our leadership team played a key role in this phase, bringing leaders and stakeholders together to plan and prepare for the go-live event. Persistency, content production, training material production, demonstrations, learning opportunities, Q&A sessions, etc. were all features of our change management preparations.

The delivery of HR, Finance and Purchasing solutions at this scale are notoriously complex and challenging due to the considerable footprint of such systems. Planning, teamwork, and tight governance was key to a successful implementation on 1 October 2024. In those first few months, success is primarily judged by high level factors. The ability to maintain operationally critical processes, for example the ability to make payments or run recruitment processes. In this regard our cutover was a huge success, with minimal operational disruption in key areas. This is not to say that there were not local issues, individual challenges or parts of the system that were not optimal at first go-live, but the organisation made a safe transition from old to new with no need for backout or emergency operating procedures.

Post go-live a period of three months of hyper-care followed during which time a number of defects were resolved, but scaled use of the system hadn’t fully revealed defects that would emerge later, nor data management issues that we needed to address as an organisation. Live use of a new system is where the learning really starts for the organisation. Between January 2025 and January 2026 we resolved additional defects, and processed a high volume of support tickets, many linked to ‘flexi-time’ and time card challenges. These issues have been amongst the most persistent in the solution requiring collaboration with Oracle to develop solutions. The ’delivery phase’ of this programme was formally closed at the end of March 2025, with remaining issued carried forward into a process of ongoing support, quarterly upgrades, defect resolution, and enhancement.

The EPM component, which had been a feature of the Phase 1 scope, was not ready for October 2024 go-live. In hindsight, it required HCM & ERP to be live so that we better understood the data structures and capabilities of Oracle Fusion to confidently inform the EPM designs and configuration. EPM was formally descoped from the Phase 1 Programme, and is proceeding today as a separate follow-on project. There have been two releases of EPM in 2025, with two more planned in 2026.