Management Update 2024
As we approach our 10th financial financial year, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect on our accomplishments across every department over the past year and to outline our plans for the year ahead…
Lindsay Hill
HEAD OF RESOURCING
FY23/24 has been an extremely busy time for process improvements and ways of working within the Associate Programme and resourcing function. This year, we have made a number of subtle amendments to processes, with more notable changes being the implementation of the End of Engagement MC Feedback process to capture specific associate feedback for reassignment purposes. We also improved the associate extension process to highlight potential risks to our MCs earlier and keep our associates regularly updated on their extensions. Additionally, we implemented a tracking process to more robustly capture all associates who hadn’t been contacted within a 3-month period, enhancing our communication and touch points to hopefully improve the feeling of value and membership within our Associate Programme. We made improvements to the vetting process for onboarding new associates, ensuring we have the right quality of associates for client engagements. We also started to engage more closely with our MCs and clients, attending more client visits and calls to capture the necessary details for assigning the most suitable associates to deliver the required outcomes and projects. We will continue to evolve the collaboration between the associate resourcing and MC teams through the next financial year to ensure we are working as a united team, striving to build better working relationships, improved Associate interaction and achieve greater success for the business.
We have also seen other successes this year, gaining CTC approval status for Heathrow Airport and Signatory status for Gatwick Airport, two achievements that are critical to mobilising projects in a timely and efficient manner. We also instigated an independent audit if our IR35 processes via our partner Kingsbridge and have been working to implement the suggested improvements and enhancements. We have worked closely with the resourcing team, upskilling through internal training based on a competency matrix implemented last year to identify and address any knowledge gaps. This will continue into FY24/25 with further internal and external training as required.
I would like to thank the entire team for their hard work and determination this year, with special thanks to Hannah and Trudy for ensuring compliance and accuracy in contracts, insurances, and vetting; to Angela for her efforts in resourcing, HR, policy reviews, contract reviews, and updates to our umbrella company contracts; and to Nurc and Hollie for their dedication to their efforts with our Associates, making them feel valued and part of something special, and their drive to continuously deliver. Hollie has shown great effort in supporting Benson and his clients, while Nurc has kept everything at HSBC running smoothly with attention to detail in vetting, resourcing, and mobilising via the HSBC Vendor Portal. The entire team has shown significant growth this year, and we are extremely proud of each and every one of you. Thank you all; without you, we wouldn’t have achieved what we have this year.
For FY24/25, we will continue to evolve the work from FY23/24, with the main focus for resourcing being to improve targeted referral campaigns, and proactively sourcing referrals from the pipeline meetings with the MCs held at the beginning of the month. This will become a greater focus as the market ramps up.
We have an exciting year ahead in FY24/25. To help us deliver on our goals and objectives, Tracy Nauth will be joining the associate resourcing team on September 2nd, adding the additional capacity needed to allow us to continue being proactive with our Associate relationships and being proactive supporting our MCs as they look to mobilise project teams to deliver client requirements.
Stephen Cox
HEAD OF OPERATIONS, PMO & MARKETING
FY23/24 has been a humongous effort with what feels like countless milestones and achievements for the PMO, operations and marketing teams. To name a few; we migrated to SharePoint, achieved our ISO9001 recertification, designed and implemented a new website, launched a new brand manual, released a huge number of high value content pieces and perhaps the biggest change of all, we implemented a new ERP system in CMAP.
When we set out our plans for the year, we were hugely ambitious, as per any strategy things have changed along the way, but on reflection I am hugely proud of the strides the back-office team have made to lay the foundations for Platform Smart’s next phase of growth, all of which has been done so whilst maintaining services levels and BAU operations.
Before I move on to our plans for next year, I want to take this opportunity to show my appreciation to Spencer Niezgoda, Tetiana Taresnko and Marie Garcia ; your efforts over FY23/24 have been unquestionable and allowed us to make the biggest back-office change in the last nine years.
Looking ahead to FY24/25 we have a number of plans in place, this will be spear headed with the release of our latest Sustainability Update in the coming weeks, followed by a continuous improvements programme for CMAP as it beds further into our BAU operations. Currently, we have ear marked Q3-24/25 to set out our next 3-year strategy for Platform Smart’s back-office operations and what our future is going to look like.
In terms of communications and marketing, our aspiration is to continue building our content repository for insights, case studies and high value content as well as looking at various improvements to future events. We have worked harder than ever before on releasing quality communications and will look to continue this trend as we move through our tenth Financial Year.
Finally, ISO27001 has been a target of ours for a while now, when we set out this goal we wanted to ensure achieving this accreditation wasn’t just a tick box exercise and instead ensure it is used as an opportunity to review our as-is and make the right changes to secure our business in a sustainable manner for the future. I look forward to bringing you updates as we move towards our audit in the coming months.
Bring on FY10!
Graham Wightman
HEAD OF FINANCE
Looking at the progress we have made on the finance team this year, we started FY23/24 with James Hallewell having just joined us as our Management Accountant and it is fair to say that without his tireless efforts and the never-waving brilliance of Deborah Dickinson, we wouldn’t have managed to achieve the incredible things we did.
As you can imagine, the biggest achievement (and challenge) of the past year has been the implementation of our new ERP, CMAP. Prior to the actual implementation, we started the year by firming up our processes, making our ways of working more efficient and really solidifying the quality of information we were producing. This meant that we had a huge head start as we moved into the system config and implementation process.
Most will know the complexity and challenges that surround a core system change within a business and our CMAP implementation was no different. Having selected CMAP as our preferred partner in late December 2023, we then set ourselves an aggressive target to have the system implemented and operational by the end of May 2024. Despite the tight timescales, we managed to achieve this with minimal disruption to BAU as possible and after a few months of being operational on the platform we’re starting to see the benefits of the new system; we hope that our active Associates are feeling the system has made their lives easier in terms of timesheet submissions and effort tracking.
I want to give a massive thanks to all Associates, staff and stakeholders who worked with us during this implementation and who were so supportive and understanding during the changeover, it truly would not have gone as smoothly as it did without your patience and support.
CMAP aside we’ve had a number of other great successes in the finance team this year. James has taken firm control of the administrative behemoth that is our HSBC account and has put it in a fantastic place where both our back office team and HSBCs are able to work seamlessly together to make sure all the financial administration is taken care of. Debs and James have also got a strong hold on our aged debt and have fostered relationships with the clients that ensure we maintain a healthy cash flow.
Moving into FY24/25, CMAP has meant we have seen a number of changes in our ways of working in the back office and we will be focusing the initial part of this year on ensuring we have our processes nailed down, make sure we’re being as efficient as possible and look to use our new capabilities to grow our financial reporting and controls to even greater heights.
As the year progresses, we plan to take this progression a step further, reaching out to the Platform Smart Associates to actively partner with them to see how we can refine our reporting capabilities and timelines to support them as best we can.
Our achievements in 23/24 have ensured the foundations are in place that align with the size of the organisation we have become, as we progress through 24/25 our aim is to build upon these, bringing in increased capability and maturity whilst ensuring we maintain the agility and flexibility and the mindset of a small organisation that makes it easier for our clients and associates to engage with.