Making Effective Decisions SCS Example — 750-Word Statement

SAs director of corporate services in a large public body of 6,000 staff, I was the senior responsible owner of a £30m, three-year programme to replace our finance, HR and procurement systems, affecting every employee and 400 suppliers. Eighteen months in, an independent assurance review rated the programme amber-red: the data migration workstream was five months behind, two of seven integration tests had failed, and benefits realisation was tracking at 60% of the business case. Continuing unchanged risked spending the remaining £12m on a system that would not work at go-live. Stopping outright meant writing off £18m and reverting to systems approaching end of life. The permanent secretary needed my recommendation within six weeks, ahead of the spending review.

TAs senior responsible owner, I had to decide whether to continue, restructure or stop the programme. The decision had to weigh sunk cost against future benefit, operational risk against procurement reality, and it had to be defensible to the board, the permanent secretary, our audit committee and, ultimately, ministers and the public accounts process.

AI was clear that my job was not to rescue the original plan but to find the decision that best served the organisation from where it actually stood. I began by refusing to rely on the programme team's own reporting, which had been consistently optimistic. I commissioned a four-week independent review by specialists who had no stake in the outcome, with access to raw project data, and I asked them to answer three questions: what was genuinely broken, what was recoverable, and what would each realistic path cost. In parallel, I visited two other departments that had completed similar replacements, one successfully and one after a well-publicised failure, to understand what had actually made the difference. The evidence that came back was sobering but useful. The core platform build was fundamentally sound; what had failed was data migration, which had been resourced at half the level comparable programmes used, and governance, where decisions had drifted upward to a board that met monthly and blocked progress. I developed three genuine options and costed each with finance. Option one, continue as planned, was indefensible: the review estimated an 80% chance of a failed go-live. Option two, stop, would waste £18m and leave us on unsupported systems within two years, with re-procurement alone costing around £4m. Option three, a structured reset, meant pausing deployment for four months, doubling migration resource at a cost of £2.3m, descoping two non-critical modules to a second phase, and replacing monthly board governance with a weekly delivery authority chaired by me. I stress-tested option three hard before recommending it. I asked the internal audit team to review the reset plan's assumptions, took the proposed supplier terms to commercial colleagues who renegotiated milestone payments so 30% of remaining fees sat behind successful migration, and tested the descoping with the finance and HR directors whose teams would live with the consequences, securing their written agreement. I then made the decision and owned it personally: I recommended the reset to the board, presented it to the permanent secretary with the assurance evidence and the costs of every alternative, including the honest admission that continuing unchanged had been the default for too long, and briefed the audit committee on the governance failures and how the reset fixed them. I moved the programme's best fifty people onto migration, brought in a proven delivery director from another department to run the reset day to day, and set five non-negotiable go-live criteria with the board so the restart could not drift. I was also conscious that 400 staff and suppliers had heard months of rumour, so within a week of the decision I held open sessions in every directorate explaining what the board had decided, why, and what it meant for them, which steadied morale and stopped two key specialists from resigning.

RThe board and permanent secretary approved the reset in full. Migration completed in the four-month window, the system went live eleven months later with all five criteria met, and first-year benefits reached £3.1m against a revised £2.6m forecast. The subsequent audit committee review rated programme governance substantial assurance, up from limited, and the permanent secretary asked me to apply the same reset framework to two other troubled programmes. The renegotiated milestone terms saved a further £1.2m when one module was descoped permanently, and supplier relationships remained strong enough for the incumbent to bid for, and win, the phase-two work on merit.