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Strategic advice
Managing and maintaining your properties are amongst the largest costs for any organisation. So you need to make sure the decisions you make about your estate are based on sound evidence and the right ones to meet your future needs.
Having a strategy and delivery plans in place for all aspects of your estate are the best way to guarantee long term performance, sustainability and stability for your organisation. It’s also a prerequisite for a number of public sector funding streams without which you might not even pass go!
Our strategic planning experts will ensure you’ve considered all options bringing our wealth of experience and expertise to your thought processes. At the heart of our advice will be our deep-rooted understanding of the sectors in which we work; putting your service users at the centre of any strategy.
Expect us to respectfully challenge your existing thinking, ask the tricky questions and suggest opportunities and possibilities you haven’t even dreamed of – to help ensure your estate is an asset to your organisation not a drain on your resources.
Put simply, we break your strategy down into three main questions:
WHERE ARE YOU NOW? | WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE? | HOW DO YOU GET THERE?
Strategic estates advice and planning
Without an estates strategy, it’s very difficult to plan, prioritise or improve.
We will work with you from the very beginning of your estate improvement journey – going back to basics and making sure you have a clear picture of the existing condition of your estate and how it impacts your staff and service delivery.
We will then assess this against your strategic and operational priorities and help you understand how your estate can enable you to mete these goals.
We’re experts in strategic planning, producing effective estates and infrastructure strategies and plans for organisations large and small across the healthcare, education and commercial sectors and can call our more specialist advice from our wider team depending on your specific priorities and challenges.
Business cases
When you have a critical project, it’s frustrating if you can’t get past the first hurdle of funding and approval.
Developing a robust business case is vital in the race to secure resources when there is limited capital available. Outsourcing this can really assist you with focus and pace in the creation of your business cases, and also provides you with an independent review, allowing your estates and service planning teams to put their energy into the operational job in hand.
Over 60% of our team are qualified Better Business CaseTM practitioners, and with our experience spanning across multiple sectors such as health, education and local government, you know that when you work with us your proposal will have the best chance of succeeding.
We’ll support you to manage and author a capital or service change business case that aligns with HM Treasury Green Book guidance, as well as any other relevant sector or organisation requirements.
Most importantly, we’ll bring your stakeholders along with the process, because major projects that have the backing of all involved are the most likely to succeed.
Recovery plans
Writing plans that you hope you’ll never use is often at the bottom of your priority list. But if the worst happens, and your organisation suffers a crisis, your recovery plans could be the difference between business as usual and total shutdown.
We can help you with disaster recovery planning, exploring how services could be delivered in alternative ways or from replacement premises in the event of an emergency requiring closure of all or part of your building.
Utilisation and efficiency analysis
If you’re honest with yourself, are you really getting the most out of your estate?
We can bring an external perspective to candidly assess the use of your current estate against your working practices, and prepare plans for alternative working and service delivery models to make sure you improve utilisation.
Think you’re doing a pretty good job? We can help you benchmark against other similar organisations to show how you’re really doing, and share best practice to ensure you really maximise use of your estate.
Capacity assessments
Ensuring your estate is adequate for current and future demand is one of the greatest pressures facing estates professionals.
We’ll work with you to understand the capacity of your existing estate, benchmarking against sector-specific best practice and guidance.
We’ll assess this against current and future demand levels, identifying any deficit or surplus, as well as looking at options for short-notice capacity-increasing methods to help you deal with surges in demand.
Demand forecasts and future projections
We don’t have a crystal ball to foresee the future. But we do have experienced estates professionals and data analysts who can look at likely scenarios of what pressures will face your estate in the short and long term.
Our data analytics team can help you understand what future demand for your services might be, based on population growth, displacement and service changes, alongside any other local or national trends or specific scenarios you may want to consider.
Our team develop and manage NHS England’s SHAPE tool so we’ve got a strong track record in gathering, analysing and visualising data to aid decision making at a national level.
Capital bid support
If you want to make major improvements to your estate, you need money. The funding landscape is complicated and difficult to navigate, so we’ll support you to identify, apply for and secure capital funding to deliver your estates ambitions.
We’ll use HM Treasury Green Book best practice to give your project the best chance of securing financing, and project manage the production of any information required to support your application.
Capital pipeline planning & prioritisation
When you’ve got an extensive programme of improvement projects, it can be hard to know where to start.
We’ll assist with the production of a methodology to allow you to prioritise competing investment requirements, helping you deliver actions in the correct order to fulfil your estate and strategic ambitions.
S106 and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL)
Section 106 and CIL funding is when contributions can be sought from housing developers towards community and infrastructure projects in the area. They can be an important source of financing local health and education facilities.
We’ve got an extensive track record of identifying and securing this funding, turning your dreams of refurbished, extended and new buildings into reality.
We’ll work on your behalf, liaising with local planning authorities to identify proposed developments that might attract Section 106 funding implications or CIL contributions, assessing the impact of the new development, and quantifying the amount of funding you can request.
Options appraisals
Making the correct decision at the right time is one of the most challenging parts of estates management.
Working alongside your teams, and aligned with HM Treasury Green Book guidance, we can identify and assess all the potential ways to meet your objectives. As well as facilitating the process of creating a range of options, we can also carry out the detailed qualitative and quantitative assessments required in order for you to reach the best decision for your organisation.
in-house registered practitioners
Better Business Cases
The majority of our team are qualified Better Business Case registered practitioners, giving you the best chance of securing funding and stakeholder approval for your critical business cases and spending proposals.
Social value strategies and return on investment assessments
It’s an important part of our culture that we make sure we always do the right thing, and we can support you in making sure you also give back to the community in the most effective way.
Measuring social value is a key element of any business case or capital investment, and we can ensure your objectives and incentives respond to the local context and needs, as well as quantifying the anticipated return on investment and benefits generated by your proposed schemes.