Recent research shows that commissioning for sustainable and people-led change needs investment in skills, developing them and challenging them.
Investing in the skills and resources required
The skills and resources that underpin good commissioning are:
- sufficient commissioning and procurement awareness, knowledge and experience
- strong leadership skills combined with strong technical expertise to harness the appetite for change
- strong relationships within and between the public, third and independent sectors
- robust data systems that enabled high-quality decisions
- sufficient investment in time and energy is required in relationship development and codesign
Developing locally driven solutions
The research concluded that there is no one single template for commissioning well – the essential element is that responses should be specifically tailored to the local need and conditions:
Start with local context and learn from national examples.
Understand local context and design to meet local needs. This includes:
- use practice and examples from other places
- apply national frameworks to understand which tools they could use in their local solution
The key difference was their starting point. The organisations began with their local context, not a national framework or an outside example. From there, they designed a solution that fit their needs:
- building the markets you want to see – commissioning organisations can support the growth of services in the market. This approach builds capacity in the third and independent sectors by helping individuals and organisations make changes.
Challenging the fundamentals of how our system currently works
The evidence shows that making change requires us to actively challenge how the system currently works. This includes:
- questioning competition-driven approaches
- creating safe spaces to discuss power imbalances between organisations
- rethinking how we budget our resources
- addressing false beliefs about what we can achieve with available tools
- tackling risk aversion in organisations that puts up unhelpful boundaries