Continuous Improvement Strategies

By developing better contract management capabilities, your organisation can significantly improve the services it delivers and maximise its resources. With the public sector spending ?250 billion on goods and services each year, developing the core competencies for effective contract management could significantly boost savings and cost-effectiveness. Attend this A Guide to Successful Contract Management course to learn about the principles of contract management, better understand the administrative and governance side of contract management, develop more effective relationships with suppliers and gain advice on how to ensure the contract is being effectively delivered. On this A Guide to Successful Contract Management course, develop the knowledge and skills needed to successfully manage the contract process through to completion.

Success in the delivery of any project, programme or policy is dependent on the effective management of stakeholders. Without the support and buy-in from key contributors, projects face an increased risk of failure. In order to develop an effective strategy for successful stakeholder management, you must have the tools to build, maintain and evaluate effective partnerships. This A Guide to Successful Stakeholder Management training course gives you the necessary tools to perfect your stakeholder management skills. Learn how to get buy-in to support your organisation’s objectives, identify and map key stakeholders, effectively manage conversations and learn how to evaluate stakeholder relationships.

Large-scale organisations often deal with a significant number of external suppliers, meaning efficiency and effectiveness can be difficult to achieve. Attend this one-day, interactive training course with procurement expert to develop a strategy for successful supplier performance management and ensure your organisation is delivering the best value within public services. Learn how to alleviate risks and identify potential issues, while guaranteeing that all of your suppliers comply with their contracts.

Joint ventures offer the opportunity to innovate and change the way services are delivered so that frontline services can be protected in the face of external pressures. With lots of successful public-private partnerships, many public sector organisations are taking advantage of the opportunities to deliver more effective services. However, you must fully understand and overcome the legal complexities to setting up a joint venture. This highly interactive course provides you with the most effective legal guidance on setting up a joint venture. This A Legal Guide to Setting up a Joint Venture course gives you the necessary tools and practical guidance to be able to effectively understand the legislation around setting up a joint venture, decide what joint venture works best for you, and overcome the intricacies to contract and procurement law.

In January 2021, the UK government announced that the UK would associate itself to Horizon Europe. This means that UK research institutions can access €95.5 billion worth of funding. Attend this Accessing Horizon Europe Funding training course to learn how to apply for funding for your research projects. Through interactive workshops and tutor-led discussions, gain a more comprehensive understanding of the Horizon Europe framework, learn about the objectives of the programme, the rules of participation, understand how to plan and prepare a proposal and better position your research project to secure funding. Leave the day with a firmer understanding of the Horizon Europe funding process and in a better position to gain funds for your research project.

As a Manager you make critical decisions on a daily basis, which have a direct impact on your staff, organisation and yourself. Agonising over a decision or making the wrong decision, can often take up time, resources and money. This Advance Decision Making course helps you overcome the common traps that can inhibit your decision-making processes. Attend this highly interactive training course to learn and then apply proven methodologies, which will aid your decision-making process and overcome complex issues. Leave the day with proven and actionable decision-making techniques, which can aid your role as a Manager or Project Lead.

A highly developed understanding of Excel can help organisations to monitor and manipulate data. This Advanced Excel Training course has been specifically designed to help those with an understanding of Excel, to make better sense of their data. By attending this Advanced Excel Training course, gain a better understanding of using Excel tools, importing, cleaning and validating data, and gain the techniques to manipulate data. Practise using Excel tools on public sector data and benefit from expert guidance from our trainer to increase your skills and give you a firmer understanding of more innovative techniques. Delegates will be asked to bring their own laptops.

Having a more effective memory can help improve your performance, productivity and create more efficient ways of working. When things go wrong at work, it is often down to people forgetting key information. With greater demands being put on professionals and some facing information-overload, this interactive course helps you use your memory to remember and action key tasks at work. Through practical workshops and exercises this Advanced Memory training course gives you the tools and knowledge to be more effective at remembering key tasks. By taking a memory test at the start and the end of the day, you will be able to show your progression. Leave the day with practical and actionable memory techniques to be used once you are back in the workplace.

Taking minutes involves more than simply writing notes. Being able to keep up in busy meetings, turn notes into concise minutes and cascade the relevant action points to the right people are all critical skills that minute takers have to master. Attend this Advanced Minute Taking course, led by communications expert Sue Calthorpe, in order to maximise your listening and writing capabilities and gain invaluable practice and feedback. Through a series of tutor-led sessions and interactive exercises aimed at the public sector, leave the day confident in your abilities as a minute taker and generate tangible results in your role.

Relationships underpin success at organisations across all sectors. Better relationships lead to better outcomes and greater ease-of-business. Creating these relationships can sometimes be an imprecise science, so having tried and tested techniques that facilitate first meetings is crucial. This Advanced Networking Skills course equips attendees with a variety of techniques, to prepare them for a range of networking situations and enable more opportunities to create new business and sustain current clients. For whatever role you fulfil this course offers the essential skills to keep your relationships and clients engaged, energised and profitable.

Social media can help public sector organisations engage with their service users, convey key messages and build trust and awareness. This Advanced Social Media Training course has been specifically designed to help your organisation gain the knowledge of the most up to date and practical social media tools to help improve your organisation’s social media footprint and give you the competitive edge. By attending this Advanced Social Media Training course learn how to benchmark your social media strategies against other organisations, develop a more effective engagement strategy, monitor and report the impact of your social media activity, and gain the expertise to effectively utilise more advance social media tools.

A highly developed understanding of using statistical models can help your organisation improve productivity and enhance performance. This Advanced Statistical Analysis course has been designed to help those with a background in statistics to understand and use more advanced statistical models, to make better sense of their data. By attending this Advanced Statistical Analysis course, gain a better understanding of the concepts behind advanced statistics, learn how to apply the Bayesian model and utilise more complex statistical methods, such as non-linear curves and hypothesis testing to make greater sense of your organisation’s data. Through highly interactive workshops, you will practice using R programming on public sector datasets, which will help you utilise more advance statistical methods to improve your organisation’s performance.

With stretched resources and competing priorities, it can feel impossible to complete all your tasks on time to a high standard. Pressure on you and your teams can lead to a greater difficulty with managing projects to deadline and putting your time to the most effective use. Whether you feel like you’re spending valuable time attending ineffective meetings or getting caught up sifting through large quantities of emails, there can be a number of barriers to feeling like you’re being productive with your time. Attend this one-day Advanced Time Management course to learn the skills to plan, schedule and communicate effectively and transparently to make sure you meet competing deadlines. Leave the day with the ability to be proactive and discover important techniques for how and when to delegate, and when to say no. Develop an action plan to implement back at work and reap the benefits of efficient productivity.

A highly developed understanding of using trends and forecasting models can help your organisation monitor and improve its performance. This Advanced Trends and Forecasting course has been specially designed to help those with a background in statistics or analysing trends to understand and utilise more advanced statistical models, to make better sense of their data. By attending this Advanced Trends and Forecasting course, gain a better understanding of the concepts behind advanced forecasting, learn how to forecast long-term, short-term and mid-range trends, and handle seasonality.

The explosion in personal data and advances in technology, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, has created fantastic opportunities for your organisation to deliver better services, but also significant responsibilities on how you use and manage personal data. By understanding the growing practice of data ethics and the government’s Data Ethics Framework, you will be able to embed data ethics practices within your organisation, when managing data and new technology projects. This Applying Data Ethics training course gives you a firmer understanding of data ethics, the data ethics framework, aligning data ethics practices with data protection legislation, improving accountability and transparency, embedding data use responsibly, and a data ethics toolkit to take back to your organisation.

Attend this one day Applying Emotional Intelligence and Ensuring Personal Resilience course, led by emotional intelligence and leadership coach Duncan Enright, to utilise EI to improve workplace well-being and employee performance. Develop a greater level of self-awareness and empathy, alongside an understanding of key techniques to enhance personal resilience. Through a range of workshops and public sector focused case studies, this course provides you with a range of tools and long-term skills to enhance your professional career, through a deeper understanding of yourself and your emotions.

The ability to make a long-lasting strong and assertive impression on colleagues and key stakeholders is an invaluable tool to have in the workplace. Assertiveness can help you influence your colleagues, peers and external stakeholders in a firm and positive way, ensuring that you are perceived the way you intend to be and get the results you’re looking for to be successful. This Assertiveness in the Workplace course gives you the core practical skills to communicate, use body language and manage a range of different scenarios – including difficult conversations – to get your point across in the best possible way, with a heightened sense of confidence and self-assurance.

Stress is now the most common form of work-related illness. In 2017/18 stress, depression or anxiety accounted for 44% of all work-related ill health cases and 57% of all working days lost due to ill health, according to a study by the Health and Safety Executive. Our Building Personal Resilience course is designed to help you identify your stress triggers and give you the tools and techniques to deal with difficult situations. Learn how to increase your resilience and gain practical solutions to improve your wellbeing. With the public sector facing the challenges of intense scrutiny and stretched resources, workplace stress is even more prevalent than in other sectors. Therefore, the ability to overcome work-related stress and improve personal resilience has never been more important. Attend this timely course to effectively build your own personal resilience and combat stress both in and out of work. Leave with the tools, knowledge and confidence to effectively manage your stress, and develop a personal resilience plan to implement back at your organisation.

Negotiation is a cornerstone of doing business, both internally and externally. Ensuring that negotiations result in mutually beneficial outcomes is optimal. Achieving win/win situations isn’t always straightforward. This Business Negotiation Skills course navigates the process of negotiating and pinpoints steps to give every interaction the best chance of succeeding. By safeguarding and relaying your priorities, as well as being empathetic to your stakeholders’ needs, this highly-interactive day brings into play dealing with deadlocks and difficult conversations, complex situations, power dynamics and all-important trust-building exercises that go beyond usual methodologies of negotiation. Join world-renowned negotiation specialist, Simon Horton, and be guided through tried and tested success stories of negotiations, learn how to build better relationships and achieve your specific business goals.

Implementing workplace diversity and inclusion is not only beneficial from an ethical perspective, but it also has direct tangible benefits for the performance of your organisation and the engagement of your employees. The Equality Act 2010 ensures that all workplaces are fair, equal and compliant with the law, however, developing a strategy which maximises diversity and implementing a workplace culture of inclusion can help your organisation achieve greater staff retention and motivation, create a happier work environment and cut costs associated with staff turnover. Join Employment Law Partner, Emma Bowers, on this highly interactive one-day training course to learn how to maximise inclusivity and diversity in the workplace. Gain insight on a number of real-life case studies to receive advice on how to respond to certain diversity-related scenarios, how to apply legislation in real terms and get an update on the ever-developing stance of the law. Attend to hear from Felizitas Lichtenberg, Global Diversity &Inclusion Lead, at Vodafone to hear more on their diversity strategy. Learn how their strategy and procedures have been developed, the results in terms of inclusion, engagement and business outcomes, and gain practical tips to replicate back at your organisation. Work with the Chair to create a positive, innovative strategy to implement back at work and reap the benefits of a happier, more inclusive workforce.

As a specialist in your field, whether it’s in IT or finance, you have to give advice and pass on your knowledge to colleague’s and senior stakeholders on a regular basis, who might not be familiar with what you are saying. This Communicating and Presenting Complex Information training course has been specifically designed to help public sector professionals, with a technical or specialist background, to convey their knowledge in a much clearer and understandable way. By attending this Communicating and Presenting Complex Information one day training course you will overcome the common challenges to presenting information, gain verbal techniques to convey specialist information in a simplified and confident way, use plain English writing to transform jargon text into engaging prose, and learn how to visualise information in an attractive format. Through interactive workshops you will gain the tools to overcome the common frustration of not being understood by peers and senior stakeholders.

A data subject access request (SAR) is a legal right for individuals to access the information that an organisation holds about them. Recent data protection legislation has had a significant impact on how organisations manage and respond to data subject access requests (SARs). The abolition of the ?10 administration fee, reduced timescale for responding to a SAR, and higher fees for not complying, all pose significant challenges to how organisations manage SARs. This Complying with Data Subject Access Requests course has been specifically designed to help you to identify and manage SARs. Through a series of interactive workshops, gain hands on experience at understanding the latest legislation on SARs, identifying and managing SARs, and applying the exemptions. Attend this training course to take back a SARs handling toolkit to ensure that you and your organisation successfully comply and respond to a SAR.

Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIRs) are handled differently to FOI requests and it’s essential that your organisation knows the difference. Our Complying with the Environmental Information Regulations course led by Information Governance Specialist, Iain Harrison, equips you with the skills, knowledge and processes to excel at managing all issues surrounding EIR. Not only will you gain a firmer understanding of EIR and the key differences between FOI and Environmental Information Regulations, but you’ll learn how to refuse a request and develop more effective complaint handling procedures. Leave the day with an EIR handling toolkit that can be applied within your organisation.

Attend our Confident Communication and Assertiveness course led by Communications Coach, Anne Walsh, to enhance and practice best ways of assertiveness, helping you to become a more decisive, influential person and communicate effectively to yield results. Through a series of practical role-play scenarios designed to develop your communication style, put your confidence and assertiveness to the test and receive individual, professional feedback to take back to your organisation.

In the UK, women are paving the way in technology to create an impact and redress the gender imbalance, but they still only make up 19% of the industry’s workforce and only 22% of leaders and decision makers. It can sometimes be difficult for women to exert influence and communicate with confident credibility, skills which are exceedingly in demand as women define and develop their professional roles and career paths within the technical sector. This interactive, one-day course has been designed specifically for women in technology. It offers a highly effective toolkit of transformative, performance-based techniques, involving body, breath and voice. These will be practised and then applied to different communication settings and a number of role-play scenarios specific to the industry. These will enable you to develop greater flexibility and choice in how you react, respond and communicate in a sector dominated by male leaders. Explore interchanging between different communication styles and language choices to assist you in communicating assertively, from a position of personal power, knowledge and confidence. This toolkit can be practised repeatedly to enable you to increase your sense of personal power, credibility and nascent leadership capacities.

This one-day interactive, practical course has been designed specifically for women in the workplace. It focuses on developing and embodying the essential skills needed to create impact and communicate with confident credibility, skills that are much in demand as women define and develop their professional roles and career path within the workplace. This Confident Communication for Women in the Workplace course, offers a highly-effective toolkit of transformative performance-based techniques, involving the body, breath and voice. These will be practiced and then applied to different communication settings and role-play scenarios to enable you to develop greater flexibility and choice in how you react, respond and communicate. Explore flexing between different communication styles and language choices to assist you in communicating assertively, from a position of personal power, knowledge and confidence. The skillset can be adapted flexibly to support professional roles at all levels, within different sectors, including newly-emerging, as well as more established industries.

This Confident Communication for Women in the Workplace course offers a highly effective toolkit of transformative, performance-based techniques, involving the body, breath and voice. These will be practiced and then applied to different communication settings and role-play scenarios to enable you to develop greater flexibility and choice in how you react and communicate. Explore flexing between different communication styles and language choices to assist you in communicating assertively, from a position of personal power, knowledge and confidence. This toolkit can be practiced repeatedly to enable you to increase your sense of personal power, credibility and nascent leadership capacities.

According to the “Cross-Government Fraud Landscape Bulletin 2019-20”, the estimated fraud cost to the government outside of the tax and welfare system is £2.5- £25bn per year. This increases to £29.3bn-£52bn when fraud against the tax and welfare system is included. With fraud increasing due to Covid-19 and fraudsters getting more sophisticated, now is the time to develop more effective strategies to counteract fraud. This virtual Counter-Fraud Training course has been specifically designed for public sector organisations to gain the necessary tools and techniques to identify, prevent and tackle cases of fraud. Attend this interactive course to assess the current fraud landscape, gain more effective counter-fraud techniques, utilise data and technology to detect fraud, and work with the trainer to develop counter-fraud strategies.

Strategic communications has never been more important for the public sector. Organisations must communicate effectively with their external and internal stakeholders to build trust, manage reputation and engage them with priorities and objectives. Meanwhile the way we communicate and interact has been completely altered in the last year and requires adapting current strategies to the new context. On this highly-interactive Creating Effective Communication Strategies course, which uses breakout rooms, learn the principles of strategic communications, how to align them with corporate objectives and how to create a communications strategy. Leave the course with several useful tools to use in your organisation. There will be plenty of opportune moments for networking and sharing resources and experiences with other delegates. Gain valuable contacts with other like-minded peers to create that invaluable ongoing support network.

Public sector organisations have a variety of audiences they must communicate with. Given this, it is essential that digital content is effectively planned, managed and created to clearly inform and engage them. Attend our Creating Innovative Content course to boost your creativity, improve your organisation’s content and enhance your audience experience. Identify best practices across content types to build trust with your target and answer their questions while developing awareness on your actions. Join our online content expert, Alan Rutter, to gain jargon-free practical advice on creating captivating content that speaks to your audience based on your objectives. Leave the day with a collection of tools and templates to use and improve your content producing process and even reach new audiences.

Data breaches, information leaks, staff shortages, cuts to funding and services, these are all crises that could affect your organisation. Yet nearly two-thirds of organisations don’t feel confident that they are adequately prepared for a crisis. With so much uncertainty in the current political climate, having a good crisis communications strategy in place is critical. Providing a coherent and measured response can make or break your organisation’s reputation. This Crisis Communications course ensures that you are fully prepared for when crisis hits. Acquire practical strategies and tools to ensure smooth handling of any crisis communications. Work with the trainer to build an effective communications plan addressing all stages of a crisis, from pre-crisis preparation to post-crisis recovery and practise the skills you have learnt in a real-time scenario.

Cyber resilience means an organisation is still able to continue to operate and recover while experiencing attacks. Given this it is essential that public sector organisations have more robust counter cyber-attacks procedures and strategies in place. Attend this Cyber Resilience Training course to identify the most significant security trends, define a secure IT environment, assess your current gaps, and determine an implementation framework. Apply the knowledge you will gain into an effective strategy, stay a step ahead, and understand how it applies to your organisation. Leave the day with a clear action plan to improve your organisation cyber security framework. The emphasis throughout will be on an approach that is pragmatic and affordable.