Foreign & Commonwealth Office

The FCO is a major UK Government Department with a physical presence covering over 260 locations around the world and employing over 16,000 staff.  

The estate comprises over 5000 individual properties and rental units with an estimated value of £2.4 billion.  The challenge faced by the FCO was obtaining best value for money from its facilities management (FM) supply chain, on a global basis. How best to do this, maintaining competitive tension in an ultra-high security situation?

Concerto led the development of the FM strategy and delivered and programme managed the implementation, procurement, mobilisation and transition to new ways of working.    The project included the following key deliverables:

• Design, development, recruitment and implementation of a new Centre of Excellence for the professional management of FM across the estate and the introduction of global regional hubs.
• Design and introduction of a new Performance Management Model for FM, moving the organisation from a ‘management intensive’ to ‘performance and information led’ organisation.
• Design, delivery and procurement of new regional outsourced FM contracts.
• Design, development and procurement of a new centralised customer contact centre (Helpdesk) to enable staff to access the new FM services.
• Management of the transition to new ways of working, development of new processes and standard operating procedures and re-alignment with the retained organisation.  

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The benefits achieved for the client in line with the agreed Business case include:

• Improved value for money and efficiency in the way that FM services are delivered across the portfolio, producing financial benefits in excess of 3.5m per annum.
• Improvements in estate health and safety compliance, from a base of circa 48% to 90%.
• Standardisation of the FM service across the estate and the provision of a consistent, performance based and affordable service for the client.
• Reduced back office management costs and professionalised the management the FM service.
• Improved agility and flexibility by shifting fixed staff costs to the external market via outsourcing.
• Improved operational security, Property and FM systems and the control and management of information across the estate.  
• Shifted the delivery of FM services from a highly reactive to a proactive planned regime.