Changing and Improving SCS Example — 750-Word Statement

SI was director general of a public body of 4,000 staff delivering services through nine regional directorates. Each directorate ran its own processes, improvement was patchy and dependent on individual leaders, and the organisation faced a 20% budget reduction over three years alongside rising public expectations. Previous efficiency programmes had delivered short-term savings but no lasting change, and staff were understandably weary of initiatives announced with fanfare and abandoned within a year. Customer complaints were rising steadily, and our annual staff survey showed trust in senior leadership at a record low. The board was supportive but sceptical, having seen programmes come and go.

TAs the senior responsible owner for organisational performance, I decided we needed a single, lasting approach to continuous improvement rather than another short-term efficiency drive. I owned the strategy, the investment case and, ultimately, whether the culture actually shifted, and I was clear with the board from the outset that this was a three-year commitment, not a quick fix. I reported progress to the board quarterly and made the same data available to every member of staff.

AI began with a honest diagnostic: I visited all nine directorates in my first two months and asked frontline staff two questions, what stops you doing a good job and what would you fix first. Themes from over 600 conversations shaped the strategy, and I published a summary to every member of staff, including the uncomfortable findings about slow decisions and duplicated approvals. I co-designed the approach with a group of 30 staff from every grade and region rather than handing down a finished model from the centre, because I knew imposed systems fail. I made the case to the board for a dedicated improvement capability: a small central team of eight plus protected time for 60 trained practitioners across the directorates, funded by redirecting money from a consultancy budget I chose to cut. I introduced a simple, shared method for testing changes, and I insisted every directorate leadership team ran at least two improvement cycles a year on problems their own staff had raised. I changed the incentives deliberately: director scorecards included improvement activity and staff voice results alongside delivery and finance, so attention followed. I modelled the behaviour myself, chairing a monthly session where teams presented tests that had failed as well as succeeded, and I shared my own early misjudgements, including a procurement change I had to reverse when the evidence showed it was hurting smaller suppliers. Where two directors saw the approach as a threat to their autonomy, I spent time with each, gave them room to adapt the method to their context, and held the line only on the shared measures. I brought in external challenge, inviting leaders from two high-performing organisations in other sectors to review our progress and tell us plainly what they saw, and I published their findings unedited. I made sure improvement projects tackled the issues staff raised most: we removed 140 separate approval steps in the first year alone, which did more for credibility than any speech I gave. I linked the programme to our planning round, so every directorate bid had to show how it would improve the service, not just maintain it. I protected the practitioners' time when budget pressure mounted, arguing at the board that cutting capability to save money was exactly the mistake previous programmes had made. After 18 months I commissioned an independent review and published the results internally, which showed what was working and where energy had faded. I used that evidence to refresh the programme rather than defend it, simplifying the reporting that teams told us had become a burden and refocusing effort on the two directorates that were struggling to embed the approach.

ROver three years, the organisation delivered £21 million of recurring savings, 14% above target, while staff engagement rose by 11 points and the proportion of staff who felt able to improve their work rose from 38% to 67%. Average processing times across our five main services fell by 28%, customer complaints dropped by a third, and the approach was cited by our sponsoring department as a model for the wider family of arm's-length bodies. Trust in senior leadership recovered by 19 points in the staff survey. Most importantly to me, two years after I moved on from the role, the method was still in daily use, because it had been built with the organisation rather than done to it.