Working Together Grade 7 Example — 500-Word Statement

SIn my department, a licensing casework process passed through four separate teams across two directorates before a decision was issued. Each team kept its own list, handed work on by email and blamed the next for delays. The backlog had grown to 9,000 cases, ministers were asking questions, applicants were waiting months, and a previous fix had failed because one directorate had redesigned the process for everyone else.

TAs the Grade 7 with policy responsibility but no line authority over the delivery teams, my task was to build a cross-departmental working group that would redesign the handoffs together rather than impose another top-down solution on teams I did not manage.

AI began with a listening round, spending an hour with each of the four team leaders separately before any group meeting. I asked what the process cost them and what a good outcome would look like, and I wrote up the themes without attributing blame. I also interviewed a dozen applicants, which gave us a shared picture of the people behind the cases. Three of the four leaders had never met face to face, so I proposed a working group with one operational lead from each team, initially chaired by me, and I agreed terms of reference that protected every voice: decisions by consensus, data shared openly and credit shared publicly. Our first sessions were tense. When two leaders disputed whose queue was the bottleneck, I asked the group's analyst to build an end-to-end picture from all four systems, and we found that handoffs, not any single team, caused 70 per cent of the delay. I used that shared evidence to move the group from blame to design. I facilitated mapping workshops where the group redesigned three handoffs, negotiated a single owner for each case and agreed a dashboard that all four teams could see. Where consensus stalled, such as over a proposed triage step, I suggested a one-month pilot so evidence rather than seniority would decide. Beyond the group, I kept sceptical directors onside with a fortnightly one-page note and private briefings before each milestone, and I brought frontline staff into testing sessions so the design reflected real work. When one director tried to withdraw their team, I met them with the group's data, acknowledged their resource worries and agreed a phased start that protected their busiest period. I arranged for the group to report progress jointly to both directors, so the project visibly belonged to everyone, and I named other people's ideas in senior meetings rather than presenting the work as mine.

RWithin six months the backlog fell by 38 per cent, from 9,000 to around 5,600 cases, and the average wait dropped from 41 to 24 days, with applicant complaints halving. Sick absence across the four teams also fell by a fifth. The working group became a permanent board, its consensus model was adopted for two other processes, and the four teams now share a single induction for new staff.