Future Commissioning Workshops

Please join us for two full-day workshops looking at contract design, contestability and market stewardship with Gary Sturgess of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.

These workshops have been designed for senior commissioning practitioners and will look at:

• 30 October, 09:00-16:45: Contestability and the art of contracting, where we will look at competition and contracting as instruments of management, current contracting models, transactional versus relational forms, discontinuity, fragmentation and integration, and certainty versus innovation

• 9 November, 09:00-16:45: System design & market stewardship, when we will look at designing contestable systems and introduce some of the different systems through which contestable services are delivered – commoditised markets, vouchers, matching markets, commissioned services, contestable services, supply chains

The content of the workshops is linked and attending both is recommended, but not required – you are welcome to apply to attend either of the days individually. The venue is in Central London.

There is a participation fee of £150 per workshop (or £95 per workshop to Alumni of the Cabinet Office Commissioning Academy). There are a limited number of places available – please apply by registering your interest for one or both workshops:

• Contestability and the art of contracting
• System design & market stewardship

About Professor Gary Sturgess

Professor Gary Sturgess holds the New South Wales Premier’s Chair of Public Service Delivery at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, an educational institution established by the national and provincial governments of Australia and New Zealand. His work programme focuses heavily on commissioning and contestability.

He is a former civil servant, having been Cabinet Secretary in the NSW State government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From 2000 to 2011, he was Executive Director of the Serco Institute, a corporate think tank based in London, which studied the design and operation of public service markets.

In his current role, Professor Sturgess works closely with civil servants in Australia and New Zealand on the commissioning of public services. He teaches a three-day Commissioning Academy for the Institute of Public Administration Canada in Toronto and Ottawa each year.