‘We tell clients what we see, then stay until the work is done.’
We hire people who have run service operations, not only advised on them. You will understand operations management, ideally in the service sector, and be comfortable with numbers: demand, capacity, cost and time. You will be able to sit with a frontline team in the morning and a board in the afternoon and be taken seriously by both. Above all, you will be curious about why work happens the way it does, and patient enough to help people change it themselves.
Our work is about how service organisations operate: how demand arrives, how work flows, how teams are organised and how customers experience the result. That covers operating model design, process improvement, customer experience, digital change and the training that makes improvement last. Our clients are banks, insurers, utilities, travel operators, universities, public bodies and health providers. We take on fewer projects than many firms of our size, and we judge ourselves by what our clients can still do once we have left, not by the length of the engagement.
Most of our projects are delivered alongside client teams, not handed to them. We work in joint teams with frontline staff and managers, coach the people who will run the new way of working, and share our methods openly. Consultants often move between client work and teaching on our accredited courses, which keeps both honest. You will be expected to analyse data, facilitate workshops, write clearly for senior audiences and spend time on an operations floor, sometimes all in the same week.
Our head office is in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, where we also run our training centre, but most of our work happens at client sites across the UK. We do not expect you to live near Oxford. Many of our consultants work from home between client visits, and we plan travel so that most weeks include at least one day at home. Client work does mean regular overnight stays during busy phases of a project, and we are open about that at interview.
Every consultant has a development manager: a senior colleague outside their project team who meets them monthly and agrees their development plan. New consultants complete our foundation programme in their first six months, covering our methods, client conduct and facilitation, and work towards practitioner certification with the Service Operations Institute. Experienced hires spend their first weeks learning how we work before leading client teams. Everyone has ten paid development days a year to spend on courses, conferences or research of their choosing.
Ruth Calloway
Managing Director
“I came here from running operations, and I still spend two days a week with clients. That is deliberate. A firm that sells practical advice should be run by people who still do the work.”
Anjali Mehta
Head of Customer Experience
“What keeps me here is seeing change hold. A year after a project I call the team leaders we worked with. More often than not, they have kept improving without us.”
Grace Okonkwo
Principal Consultant, Digital
“I came from a technology background and expected to build systems. Here I spend as much time with frontline teams as with developers, and the digital work is better for it.”
We recruit a small graduate intake each September, usually four to six analysts, from business, engineering, operations management and social science degrees. Graduates join client teams from their first month, complete our foundation programme and work towards practitioner certification within two years. We also take a few master's students each summer for ten-week placements on live projects. If your school or society would like us to run a case-study workshop or careers talk, email our careers team.
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When half the team works from home, team leaders lose the quick desk-side conversations that did most of their coaching. Here is how to put them back.
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