Government Commercial Function

Client Profile
The Government Commercial Function was established to improve and ensure capability in
the commercial profession, including procurement, across all government departments.
Eventually the GCF evolved into the body that recruited, employed, deployed and developed
all senior commercial staff across central government. The organisation that delivered the
services to this population including central employment was the Government Commercial
Organisation.

Client Requirement
The GCF set out to recruit a Chief Operating Officer for the GCO. The individual would be
responsible for the leadership and functional delivery of the employment, capability and
performance requirements of the GCO. As such they needed to be a procurement or
commercial professional, with experience in the leadership of transforming organisational
commercial capability through OD type initiatives and programmes. They also needed to be
comfortable in a complex and bureaucratic organisation, able to blend the need for results
with the sustainable transformation to engender long term improvement in the profession.

Our Approach & Methodology
The requirement for this role had three prongs – must be senior procurement, must have
ODD experience specifically in capability, and must be capable of organisational operational
leadership. Our search therefore focussed on organisations with recent strategic
procurement/commercial function centralisation/transformation programmes, and which had
scale and complexity comparable to the GCF. There were several strong internal candidates
for the role, and of course the role was advertised although this source led to a
predominantly HR application pool.

Outcome
The successful candidate came from a major telecommunications organisation, where he
had built a name for himself in leading a major structural transformation of procurement
including the establishment and development of a successful capability programme. He has
since made a significant impact in the role and is considered a high quality appointment.