DVLA
suddenly in charge of all aspects of IT . Therefore , everything – from licences , support and maintenance , hardware , software , resourcing , contracting – comes in-house . So , that ’ s been a big change for us in the last couple of years .”
For this project , the team won the award for the Best Public Procurement Project in 2016 at the CIPS ( Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply ) Supply Management Awards , and the GO Award for Best Contract Management Initiative in 2015 / 16 .
BEST IN CLASS This is not the only area in which the DVLA has won an award recently . The agency won the Skills Award at the 2017 Civil Service Awards for its CLASS programme . “ I ’ m very committed to learning and development , and we ’ ve been running for the last couple of years a programme for upskilling and developing our staff . We call it CLASS , which is an acronym for ‘ commercial leadership and skills support ’. The CLASS programme ’ s been very successful ,” states Falvey .
“ We ’ ve got staff doing professional exams with CIPS , and we ’ ve developed our CLASS programme , which aims to complement formal CIPS training and includes practical learning modules and workbased projects . We ’ ve also got a mentoring programme , which is more informal , and staff take-up of this has been excellent .”
As with the IT contracts , CLASS is run entirely in-house by the DVLA . “ We have done that all ourselves , that ’ s why we ’ re very proud of it , because it was devised , developed and designed by my staff , working with colleagues around DVLA ,” Falvey explains .
A GROW-YOUR-OWN PHILOSOPHY For people living in southwest Wales , the home of the DVLA , employment opportunities are often challenging to come by . Indeed , according to StatsWales , Swansea has an employment rate of 67.9 %, making it within the bottom three areas within Wales . As such , staff tend to
98 February 2018