Consulting

Introduction 

The Consulting Division brings together more than 170 employees from the previous FutureGov, Foundry4 and Difrent agencies. Combining their technology, service design, change and community organising skills, they help clients solve complex challenges and digitally transform their organisations. 

Working as part of multidisciplinary teams and partnering with clients, they take a design led, agile approach to developing and implementing solutions that meet client needs. Solutions might take the form of new digital technologies, new ways of working, new operating models and structures, totally new services and client experiences or any combination of these. 

We are creative, entrepreneurial and user led in our work. We advocate for end-users, ensuring that what we design and build improves the lived experience for staff and end users. To ensure our work is sustainable, we support open source technologies and embed skills and knowledge transfer in our approach. We are deeply passionate about the impact of our work on the communities, people and planet and measure this in many ways. 

Consulting remit 

Most of our consulting clients are in the public and health sectors. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients in central, local and regional government, the NHS, and associated bodies. However, we also have a growing client base in commercial sectors, most notably in utilities. 

Many of our employees have a background in health and the public sector. They bring their deep expertise, knowledge and relationships to our work. They care about outcomes and are committed to improving service delivery for users and citizens. 

Our teams are all experienced in the Government Service standards and are dedicated to making public services more accessible to citizens. We have several long term three year plus partnerships with public sector organisations supporting wholesale transformation and redesign of their technology, organisational structure and services. 

We also have several technology partnerships, including with the leading Cloud services providers Microsoft and Amazon. These partnerships allow us to leverage the best of these platforms to help our clients create products and digital environments fit for the 21st century. 

Highlights of the past year 

This year we have come together as TPXimpact, which has helped clients to access even deeper capabilities and knowledge. In the consulting division, we’ve been able to help clients with much broader end to end digital transformation in their organisations. For example, we’ve assisted Hackney Council in transforming end to end housing services for staff and residents. This work has involved quickly forming several multidisciplinary teams across technology, design and product leadership to work alongside in house digital teams. 

As TPXImpact, we’ve also partnered more seamlessly with the Digital Experience (DX) division to combine our skills and knowledge to help clients. For example, in local government, we were delighted to help Northamptonshire West and Northamptonshire North to launch their new website following unitisation. This project combined consultancies’ strengths in service design, product ownership and technology strategy with the DX division’s credibility in Drupal (an open source web content management system), having the most extensive certified team in the country. 

Bringing together the former organisations within consulting has also allowed us to make more strategic commitments. For example, we’ve launched an engineering academy helping us to recruit and progress diverse talent from seldom heard groups into the organisation. We are also in the process of planning a similar academy for our design team. 

We’ve also been delighted in the growth of our work in central government and health. We have long-term relationships with departments including the DFE, DLUHC, HMLR, HMRC, NHSx, NHSBSA and NHSBT. We are deploying specialist teams to help with everything from user research to user-centred design to product design, complex service and organisation redesign. 

Outlook for the year ahead 

In the year ahead, we are looking to help our clients solve even more significant challenges in their organisations and communities. We are thrilled to be adding new data skills and knowledge to our capabilities as Swirrl, and Peak Indicators join the consulting division. These new capabilities will allow us to offer our clients significantly enhanced data solutions. 

As one of the largest in house nationwide design teams with significant experience in the public sector, we will continue to help our clients take bold and challenging moves to improve services for users. This year we will continue to grow our technology team, remaining technology agnostic and agile in our approach — providing clients with even greater access to technology experts who can help them implement 21st century digital tools and techniques. 

As a purpose driven team, we’ll continue focusing on making an impact through our work. We’ll be targeting winning work where we can help clients make a real difference in addressing the climate emergency. We’ll also continue to work in the open, sharing our outputs and what we are learning so others can benefit.