Working Together SCS Example — 750-Word Statement

SWhen I joined the department as director of corporate services, four directorates each ran their own casework support, finance processing and administrative teams, around 340 staff in total doing similar work under five different management structures. Quality and turnaround times varied widely, costs were rising, and each directorate defended its own arrangements. Previous leaders had tried twice to consolidate and had retreated in the face of directorate resistance. Staff in the support teams felt unvalued, turnover was high, and the department faced a 12 per cent budget reduction that made the status quo untenable. My executive colleagues agreed consolidation was necessary but expected me to deliver it without the disruption that had marked the earlier attempts.

TMy task was to bring four directorates together to design and move into a single shared service through genuine collaboration rather than imposition, so that directors, managers and staff felt ownership of the outcome and the service genuinely improved rather than merely saved money. I was determined that this time the design would be built with the people who would run it, not handed to them.

AI began with a three-month listening exercise. I visited every support team in their own offices, nine sites in total, and ran open sessions where more than 200 staff told me directly what worked, what frustrated them and what they feared. I published what I had heard, including the uncomfortable messages about leadership, so people could see I had genuinely listened rather than gathered ammunition. I met each of the four directors individually, not to sell a solution but to understand their service pressures, and I asked each to nominate a senior sponsor and a staff representative to a design board. Rather than present a target operating model, I set the board a shared problem: how do we give the department better, faster support at lower cost. The board, which deliberately included frontline staff alongside senior managers, mapped the existing services together and discovered the four directorates ran 14 different processes for the same five tasks. I set three ground rules for the board: no decisions about another team's area without them in the room, data shared openly with everyone, and disagreements surfaced early rather than fought through memos. I facilitated a series of design sprints in which mixed teams from all four directorates rebuilt those processes, and I made sure the best elements came from every directorate, so nobody could claim the new service was simply the largest team's model imposed on the rest. When two directors clashed over headcount baselines, I brought in our finance business partner as a neutral arbiter and we agreed a single verified baseline that both signed. When the board proposed a staffing model, I took it back to the nine sites for challenge before any decision, and we changed a third of it in response to what staff told us. I communicated relentlessly: a monthly all-staff note, a question inbox I answered personally within three days, and honest answers when the truth was that jobs would change. When rumours of compulsory redundancies spread, I addressed them head-on in a live question session and published our commitment to redeployment. I involved HR and the trade unions from the start, sharing the design principles early and listening to concerns, which meant the formal consultation later ran without dispute. We phased the transition over nine months, directorate by directorate, and I negotiated a handover plan with each director that protected their critical deadlines. I secured agreement from the executive team that savings would be shared visibly, with a proportion reinvested in the service's own technology, so the change was not experienced as pure extraction. I also created a joint induction and training programme so staff from different legacy teams learned the new service together rather than in their old silos, and I moved managers between legacy teams before the move so loyalties began to shift early.

REighteen months on, the shared service employs 340 staff, processes 45,000 cases a year and has cut average turnaround from 15 to eight days, with error rates down by a third. It releases £4.8 million a year, reinvested in frontline services, and engagement scores in the service are 11 points above the legacy teams' last survey. There were no compulsory redundancies. Two other departments have adopted the design-board approach, and the four directors now describe the service as ours rather than mine. The service now absorbs seasonal peaks without agency staff.