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Public Sector

Building National Commissioning Capability

Designing national commissioning systems that balance public value, fiscal responsibility and long-term service sustainability.

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Commissioning strategy and system design
Procurement, purchasing and contracting
Public value and investment
Provider performance and relationships
Long-term service and asset planning
Cross-agency governance and alignment

The challenge.

Public sector commissioning sits at the intersection of policy, funding, procurement, providers and the services people ultimately receive.

The challenge is not simply to purchase services or manage contracts. It is to make deliberate choices about how finite public resources are used to achieve the greatest public value — while maintaining service continuity, managing risk, supporting provider performance and anticipating how services and assets will need to evolve.

This becomes particularly important in fiscally constrained environments. Strong commissioning enables organisations to prioritise investment, understand value and performance, make informed procurement decisions and keep resources connected to the outcomes they are intended to achieve.

Commissioning can also span institutional boundaries. Different agencies may jointly fund the same services while bringing different mandates, accountabilities and drivers. Effective commissioning therefore requires commercial and analytical disciplines alongside the ability to create alignment across organisations and mobilise people around a shared public purpose.

Our role

Our experience spans both leading established national commissioning functions and building new commissioning capability from the ground up.

This has included leadership of the national commissioning of New Zealand's road and air ambulance services, jointly funded by Health New Zealand and ACC. The environment required coordination across public institutions, service providers and a nationally critical service system while maintaining focus on performance, sustainability and public value.

The work also looked well beyond current services, including an air ambulance transformation programme focused on the future configuration of services and assets over the coming decades.

Our experience has also included establishing the National Public Health Service Purchasing and Contracting function, creating the governance, operating model and capability foundations required to support national commissioning, procurement, purchasing and contracting activity.

Across these environments, the role involved leading multidisciplinary specialists around a cohesive direction, creating clarity about purpose and priorities, and building the collective capability needed to operate through significant system change.

Relevant capabilities

Commissioning strategy and system design
Procurement, purchasing and contracting
Public value and investment
Provider performance and relationships
Long-term service and asset planning
Cross-agency governance and alignment

How the work was done.

Our commissioning experience has required working across boundaries that can otherwise separate strategy, investment, procurement, contracting and service delivery.

Within national ambulance services, this meant leading a specialist commissioning function responsible for complex and critical road and air ambulance services while navigating the priorities and accountabilities of two government funders and multiple providers.

A key part of the work was creating cohesion across people, functions and organisations — establishing a shared direction, clarifying priorities and enabling specialists to bring their expertise to a common programme of work.

Immediate service performance also had to coexist with long-term transformation. The work included looking ahead to how air ambulance services, assets and system arrangements would need to evolve over the coming decades.

In public health, the challenge was to establish a national purchasing and contracting function from inception, putting in place the governance, operating model and capability foundations required for consistent national activity.

Across both environments, the focus extended beyond individual contracts to the wider system: the outcomes being sought, where finite resources should be directed, how funders and providers could align, how services and assets needed to evolve, and what institutional capability was required to make better commissioning decisions over time.

What changed.

The work strengthened commissioning as an organisational and system capability.

It supported clearer governance and operating arrangements, stronger connections between strategy, investment, procurement, providers and service delivery, and greater capability to make and implement commissioning decisions.

It also brought a longer-term perspective to commissioning — recognising that stewardship of nationally important services requires decisions today that anticipate future infrastructure, assets, provider capability and service models.

Done well, commissioning is more than purchasing. It is a mechanism for stewardship of public resources and public value — enabling deliberate choices in fiscally constrained environments, creating alignment across institutional boundaries and building systems capable of adapting as needs change.

Our conviction

Experience creates perspective. Perspective shapes better decisions.

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