Making Effective Decisions Grade 6 Example Statement (500 Words)

SI headed service transformation for a national regulator processing 90,000 licence applications a year. We had run a nine-month pilot of a risk-based case-handling model in two of our ten regions, and the results were genuinely mixed: productivity was up 11% and costs per case down 8%, but customer satisfaction in one pilot region had fallen four points and staff sickness had risen. Pressure was building from both directions: the delivery director wanted a national rollout, and two regional heads wanted the pilot scrapped.

TAs the senior owner of the programme, I had to recommend to the executive board whether to stop, extend or scale the pilot nationally, a decision affecting 600 staff, a £12m annual operating budget and our published service standards.

AI suspected both camps were over-reading the parts of the data that suited them, so I commissioned an independent evaluation rather than marking our own homework. While that ran, I did three things in parallel. First, I dug into the mixed results myself. The satisfaction fall, it turned out, tracked almost entirely to one region where case officers had been moved onto the new model with half the planned training, and the sickness rise was concentrated in the same teams. That suggested an implementation problem rather than a design flaw, which completely changed the decision. Second, I built three honest options with costs: stop and write off £900,000 of development spend; extend the pilot for six months in the two existing regions with the training gap fixed; or roll out nationally in one phase, which the evaluation estimated would save £1.9m a year but carried a 40% chance of service disruption based on other regulators' experience. Third, I tested my emerging view with the people closest to the work. I ran structured sessions with case officers in both regions, challenged the evaluation team on their assumptions until I was satisfied, and asked the finance director to verify the savings model line by line, which reduced the projected saving to £1.6m but made it defensible. The evidence pointed to a middle path that neither camp had asked for: extend and improve first, then scale in waves. I recommended extending the pilot for six months with the training corrected, adding one new region to test transferability, and pre-agreeing the success thresholds for a national decision: satisfaction back to baseline, productivity gains holding above 8%, and no deterioration in sickness. I presented this to the board with the evaluation, the revised savings figure and the thresholds on two pages, and was open about the uncertainty that remained.

RThe board approved the phased approach unanimously. Six months later all three thresholds were met in both regions, the national rollout began on schedule, and first-year savings reached £1.4m with satisfaction restored to baseline. The two regional heads who had opposed the pilot publicly backed the final decision, and the pre-agreed threshold model I introduced is now standard practice for all our change programmes.